Vital Force: Water Essential" curated by Kathleen Vance

featuring:

Sasha Bezzubov, Peggy Cyphers, Beth Dary, Debra Drexler, Jessica Hargreaves, Suzanne Levesque, Pam Longobardi, Sascha Mallon, Stephen Mallon, Karen Marston, Sarah Olson, Julia Pontes, Ashok Sinha, Shira Toren, Zoe Wetherall, Edie Winograde

January 17-February 9th, 2020

Opening Reception:

Friday January 17th 7-9PM

Front Room Gallery is pleased to present Vital Force: Water Essential, featuring artists that investigate the topic of water as resource, force and transport.  Artists in this exhibition approach the subject in a variety of mediums within aquatic imagery, assemblage, narrative and abstract views of this essential element.

Water is a vital resource to life on our planet, all plants and animals must have water to survive. It connects us as a society and also can be a boundary. Water can be destructive as it is healing. Rivers, canals, lakes, and oceans offer passage and a way to transport goods and people.  While safe use can be an asset, misuse and contamination can bring about dire consequences.

This exhibition expands beyond the traditional view of seascapes, beaches and shorelines, which romanticizes the view of open water, along white crested waves and in the flow of a brook or stream.  Artists in this show explore our tenuous relationship with water. In its beauty, it also holds great power; there is tension in its required ingredient for life, its immensity of volume swallows and devours, yet it is still fragile in its vulnerability to contamination.

With nearly 72 percent of the world being covered with water, only 2.5% of that is fresh. And then just only 1 percent of this freshwater is easily accessible, with much of it trapped in glaciers and snowfields.  Freshwater resources around the globe are increasingly endangered by agriculture and pollution, with ocean contamination causing environmentally devastating effects, the scale of which can be difficult to visualize without the aid of contemporary artists today.

The immensity of our oceans and open bodies of water can be nearly incomprehensible as it relates to the scale of one human. It is the artists that translate this into a way of understanding our relationship to this vast expanse of blue that divides, unifies, and is ever changing the landscape of our world.