The screen door slams, the evening shadows are long, earthy scents of salt and mowed grass emotional memories are prompted by our senses. summertime holds a special place in our memories, when as children we had the time to drink in our world and make adventures come to life. Flatrock Galley’s new show, Summer Drift is a collection of work evoking those summer days gone by, featuring oil paintings by Sara Egan, Frances Hamilton and sculpture and drawings Kyle Browne.
Sara Egan is best known for her public art. Her large scale installations can be seen through out Boston. They are bold multi media abstractions inspired by poetry or purely formal considerations. To Flatrocks Gallery she brings her most recent work , a departure. She uses her home in Annisquam as muse. This series of oil paintings are warm and personal, intimate stories she is sharing. The colors are vibrant, brush strokes alive, drenched in sunlight the viewer is welcomed into her day-dreaming. Egan uses a quote by Gaston Bachelard from the Poetics of Space to describe her work: “We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams.”
The Dock
Frances Hamilton’s paintings and collage have been exhibited throughout New England for over 25 years and are widely held in private and corporate collections. With this series of paintings of the Brynmere in Annisquam and a cabin on Squam Lake, Hamilton invites us into familiar places full of emotional echoes, where the cultural archeology of past and present offers rich material for contemplation. Using her command of color and defining light Hamilton “has explored layered memories of summer …..to examine and embrace the passage of time and the preservation of family identity which animates the empty rooms.” These are paintings that stay with you, offering details and subtley to find new paths into as time goes on, triggering memories and growth. In addition Hamilton offers her Toy Boat monotype series. These are playful, deceptivly simple images that are garanteed to make you smile.
Kyle Browne returns to Flatrocks with new work from her ongoing exploration of the “consciousness of place.” Browne is essentially an ‘environmental artist’, primarily doing site specific sculptures and graphite drawings using natural material. She offers a series of boats made from cork tree needles from the Arnold Arborteum where she has just had a solo show. Browne states “This idea of using a boat for a symbolic journey is a reoccurring theme in my work and I want to continue to push this idea through these imaginative explorations of site, nature and material…... travel, navigation, shape, the implications of childhood and nostalgia. A boat to me is freedom. The boat becomes a means of escape as well as a vessel to travel through time among the waves of the unconscious.” Browne also offers from her residency at Franklin Park Zoo, prints of graphite drawings titled The Consciousness of Bear Cages. This series, that eventually morphed into an short animation- speaks of our collective memory using bold dramatic marks to tell the story