The Governor's Academy Exhibits Local Artists’ Work in Living Systems: Fluid and Fragile

The Governor’s Academy is excited to feature Living Systems: Fluid and Fragile, an exhibition of four local artists: Erin Bligh, MJ Benson, Phyllis Ewen, and Rebecca McGee Tuck. The artists address water and landscape on a variety of levels in their sculptures, paintings, and installations as a way to pay homage to and bring environmental awareness to local ecology. Their exhibit will be on display in the gallery in the Remis Lobby of the Wilkie Center for the Performing Arts on The Governor’s Academy campus from now until Saturday, April 29.

Byfield-based artist Bligh’s work is profoundly inspired by the natural world — the flow of water, cracks in scorched earth, the organic irregularity of melting of snow, the fractal patterns of flora and fauna. They devised the concept for the pieces featured in Living Systems: Fluid and Fragile while ruminating on the myriad ways that the seasonal transitions and patterns of their youth were becoming drastically different in a world ravaged by climate change. These curated pieces are an homage to our rich natural ecosystems and the ways in which the systems of our world are all interconnected.

Portland, Maine-based painter Benson works in bold and expressive gestures and colors, with an emphasis on abstraction rooted by the familiar. She immerses herself in the outdoors, sometimes literally, with her ocean swimming, hiking, and fishing. She works with oil, acrylic, watercolor, and encaustic paint as well as earth pigments and ocean/lake water in her pieces.

Ewen hails from Cambridge and just celebrated a solo show at the Kingston Gallery in Boston. Ewen’s three-dimensional reliefs explore anthropogenic climate change and its effect on land and water by inviting us to imagine ourselves within the seascape above and below the surface of the water. She scans charts and weather maps, alters them in Photoshop, and digitally prints them. With a palette of blues, grays, white, and black, she shows fragments of volatile oceans.

Tuck is a fiber artist, a sculptor, and a collector of lost objects. Her work is a visual narrative of what she accumulates from a throw-away society and as a result she gives new life to what others discard. Tuck shares, “I walk the wrack line of the Massachusetts coastline, collecting debris. With each bag of marine trash that I bring home, I feel the precarious weight of the impact of pollution in the ocean. Every time I set out for these wrack line walks, I am faced directly with the dark reality of man-made objects that clutter, tangle and threaten sea life.”

All are welcome to experience Living Systems: Fluid & Fragile in the gallery in the Remis Lobby of the Wilkie Center for the Performing Arts on The Governor’s Academy campus from now until Saturday, April 29. Please take some time to experience the dynamic exhibition and join us for a reception on Friday, April 21 from 5:30 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. The gallery is open to the public 8:00 a.m. - 7:00 p.m. weekdays, and Saturday and Sunday by appointment (Please contact Shanna Fliegel at sfliegel@govsacademy.org).