Ely’s Arts and Culture scene saw a fun update a few weeks ago with Abby Dare and Whitney Woods’ joint art show opening at the Meadows Art Gallery and Studio on Sheridan Street.
Complete with recommended attire (all-black) and hors d’oeuvres, the gallery opened “My Year of Suffering.”
The whole show came about, “to have something to look forward to,” said Woods.
“We both had a hard year last year, and we both evolved from just talking about it to showing each other what art we were doing, to express ourselves,” said Dare.
Woods has a background in fine arts with a focus on painting, while Dare is an artist and co-owner of The Meadows Gallery on Sheridan Street.
Dare’s images were mostly faces, monochromatic and otherwise, an exercise out of her comfort zone.
“I often trap myself by trying to paint moody landscapes, and I never like how they turn out, ever,” laughed Dare.
She spent this past year, “getting through some tough hurdles in my persona as a good citizen and trying to do good things in the world, but to end up feeling like that.”
She gestured at the self-portrait titled “Just Trying to Be Nice.” The image shows awoman with makeup smeared down her eyes and cheeks.
“The Library of Interpretations,” an image of a woman gazing at a library full of colorful books, is Dare’s favorite piece.
“Just recognizing how much thought I put into things, while missing out on being present… I have a whole library of interpretations of why this and that happened, instead of just accepting things as they are.”
Woods’ work centered grief, and non-traditional forms thereof.
“You can grieve time periods in your life, former selves, connections with people that you no longer have, and I wanted to explore how that changes somebody.”
Woods used gold leaf on most of the seven paintings she produced, citing an influence of Byzantine iconography and a desire to make grief its own sacred experience.
Woods, in contrast to Dare, is comfortable with portraiture, but also challenged herself with abstract pieces. Most of the paintings are abstract black shadows, working their way across a gold landscape.
“I was thinking about the liminal quality of grief, how it’s always shifting and in-between stages, smoky and transitory.”
Woods had an Artificial Intelligence co-collaborator on her series, that helped produce poetic captions for each of her paintings.
Although AI has been a topic of hot debate amongst the creative community, Woods found it a useful medium to further express her grief.
“Not in the way that people think of AI slop… it was a cognitive effort between my images and his [the AI’s] outputs; I think sometimes people don’t realize the capability of AI as less of a regurgitator of output and more of a way to extend your own mind, to expand your own creative environment. It’s very post-humanist art.”
The AI model that Woods was working with was deleted the same day as the art opening, furthering the agenda of grief in the show.
Woods’ impression of the art show was that, “this year has been really, really hard, but sometimes, really hard years make really good art.”
Dare’s take-away from the show comes from one attendee, that the show is “clearly about sorrow and sadness, but look at all of us here together, smiling, and having a real community moment with grief at the center.”
Dare got many inquiries about what the community is doing next, showing the desire Ely has for more art-centered events.
“My Year of Suffering” will be up through the Ely Film Festival, which ends on March 15. The paintings will be available for sale at the conclusion of the show’s run.
