From Saturday, April 30, 2016 to Sunday, June 26, 2016, True North Gallery presents “Outfoxed: A Celebration of Fox Art.”
To launch our spring season, True North is presenting a group exhibition of art inspired by foxes. The show includes work in stone, metal, glass, ceramic, oil, acrylic, watercolor, mixed media, and photography.
One of the highlights of the show is “Renard” by artist Juliana Boyd, from Hamilton, MA. Boyd uses a combination of surface design techniques, such as appliqué and needle felting, to create exquisitely detailed wool “paintings.” In “Renard,” a beautifully rendered fox sits unapologetically on an overstuffed chair, upholstered in toile fabric. He is looking over his shoulder, as if he is about to curl up on the chair and claim it as his own. Boyd’s portrait explores the contradictory nature of the fox: cunning, but careless, and at home in both wild and cultivated landscapes.
Another highlight—by Sarah Seabury Ward, from Newburyport, MA—is a glass sculpture of a sleeping fox with two kits tightly tucked into her body. Ward’s softly representational style captures the beauty of the fox’s form, as well as the bond between a fox and her kits. The original was created in clay, and then cast in amber-colored didinium glass, which changes color in different sources of light. In natural and incandescent light, the sculpture is a warm red-amber, but under fluorescent light, the color picks up greenish-gold highlights. This color-shifting quality of the glass makes the sculpture almost “flicker” and plays into the mythical association between foxes and fire.
Artist Charlotte Greenbaum, originally from Hamilton, MA, but currently living in Brooklyn, has four ink drawings in the show. The drawings in the series, titled Skulk (named after the term for a group of foxes), are both playful and precise. Greenbaum’s sensitive and highly nuanced line work suggests a profound intimacy with the fox and its shape-shifting vulpine nature. Her foxes are intense, beautiful, unpredictable, and at times slightly unnerving.
Foxes are elusive and are often seen from a distance, as a silhouette. This view of the fox inspired two sculptors in the show. UK artist, Rachel Elliot, from Glasgow, created glass fox silhouettes that she screen-printed with kiln-fired enamels. Her surface imagery ranges from text representing fox metaphors to a feather pattern that invokes the association between foxes and hen houses. Sue Kassirer, from Hamilton, MA, created a nearly life-size freestanding ceramic silhouette titled “Fox #7,” painted with clay slip in earthy tones. The fox has a beguiling expression that calls to mind the old trickster stories of fox brides and bridegrooms that seduced unsuspecting humans.
Hamilton, MA artist, Diane Carnivale, has two paintings in the show that present the spirit of the fox rather than an actual fox. “Bridge Street Fox” and “Keeping Guard” both depict a winter landscape in which stone foxes stand guard over the entrance to a former estate. Carnivale’s foxes, softly rendered with slightly cocked heads, create the impression that they are in a liminal state, somewhere between flesh and stone. They look as if they could break whatever spell froze them into stone and leap off their pedestals at any moment.
Artist Seth Fitts, from Georgia, is well known for his mixed media work that explores the realms of the imagination, soul, and spirit. He has several pieces in the show, including “Guardian Fox,” in which a larger than life fox sits next to a tree that barely reaches its knees. This oversized, mythic fox playfully reminds us of the fox that lives in our imaginations—the one that inspired fables, metaphors, and totems, and the one that outfoxes us every time.
“Outfoxed” also includes work by Wenda Atkin, Sarah Becktel, Coco Berkman, Sandy Clift, Belinda DelPesco, Alyssa Drennen, Sarah Dutko, Sam Uttecht Heltibridle, Catherine Hyde, Deb Kirkeeide, Michael O’Neal, Kristiana Parn, Salvador Romero, Elizabeth See, Diana Sudyka, and others.
The show runs from April 30 to June 26, 2016, with an Open House Weekend on Saturday, April 30 and Sunday, May 1, from 12 to 6, and a reception on Saturday, April 30, from 3 to 6 PM.
All work is for sale. For further information about True North Gallery, located at 25 Woodbury Street, in South Hamilton, Massachusetts, call (978) 468-1962 or email truenorthgallery (at) gmail (dot) com. For directions, click here.
