Fountain Street Gallery prepares for farewell
‘Limitless Translations’ is up now; the member gallery will close at the end of March
In December, Fountain Street Gallery announced plans to close. The gallery opened in Framingham in 2011 and moved to SoWa in 2017. “We’ve had a phenomenal run, and now it’s time for the next generation of gallerists to make their mark,” co-owner and director Marie Craig said in a statement. The member gallery has more shows scheduled and then will close March 31.
“Limitless Translations: The Artist as Storyteller,” a member show curated by Nilou Moochhala and Joseph Fontinha, is a little too limitless — a grab bag ranging from realism to abstraction in all kinds of mediums. How does it all fit together?
“The idea of context, the space within which an artwork is created, is inherently connected to the artists’ creative process and form,” Moochhala writes in a catalog essay. The stories the artists share in the catalog give “Limitless Translations” roots. The show is as much about the alchemy of process as it is about the end products on view.
Ingredients may include aesthetic, materials, world view, approach to making, and family. Several artists eloquently grapple with grief: Rebecca Skinner’s photographs of abandoned buildings, visually lush and filled with decay, sing with longing and regret. Sylvia Vander Sluis’s sculpture “Passage V,” a vessel of bound branches and more, honors the loss of a loved one. Moochhala’s shrine to her late father, “Those who Made Us What We Are,” features a mannequin wrapped in fabric printed with images of him, surrounded by candles and objects that resonate with his memory, such as bow ties and a foldable ruler.
Some artists define their worlds with color. Painter Robert Sullivan uses it in an abstract way to add twist and emotion to his narrative paintings. “Altus,” his blue image of an explosion, spotlights the open hand of a witness in complementary orange, as if highlighting a clue. In “Flotsam,” Craig prints a cyanotype of roiling water on neon green fabric and stitches bright glass beads atop the waves — an image at once lovely and toxic.
“Limitless Translations,” with its kaleidoscope of approaches, is like the colorful beads bobbing on Craig’s waves — various, clinging to one another, riding the depths. That’s how a member gallery works. This one will be missed.