I am part of a group exhibition coming up this weekend at the Carriage House Gallery in Oak Park! We are taking over the gallery for one weekend only, this Saturday and Sunday, October 12 & 13, for a pop-up show! We will be there hosting an open house for both days – Saturday from 12:00 – 9:00 pm, and Sunday from 12:00 – 6:00 pm. All are invited!
This is a critique group of artists I’ve been a part of since 2014, and the other three women have been meeting as a group for at least ten years prior to my joining them. We decided to call ourselves the Groundwater Collective this summer right around the same time we got really active in pursuing show opportunities. We had a fabulous show at Gallery Pink in the Oak Park Arts District back in 2017, but that is the last time we’ve shown together until now.
We all have new work – roughly thirty pieces each! – for this show, and we all have very different styles that “play well together,” we like to say. Galen’s work has geometric, midcentury vibes. Mary Jo’s abstracted figures and landscapes strongly feature drawing with charcoal, as she loves to draw figures and faces. Kelly brings surrealism into her considered and masterful collages. I tend toward the ethereal and mysterious in my mixed media pieces, with a dash of humor sometimes.
This particular series of pieces, almost all done within the last year and quite a few in recent months, has a very September feeling to it. I love September! I love to go out and walk around the lake by my house or the forest preserves nearby and take in all the subtle changes that the shift in season brings. September has beautiful soft colors, moody skies, great sounds and smells – I always love the last cicada songs that usually last until the end of the month, and then the air shifts to sometimes crisper, sometimes a little smoky, and daylight ends earlier and earlier each day. It is a month of anticipation, too, which is a lovely feeling. I chose most of these pieces because they evoke September to me.
This series of work also has a commonality of gel plate printed botanicals in most of the pieces. The prints are usually of plants that are in my backyard, by the water, or from the forest preserves. I have a few prints that stand alone as monotypes, some that I added paint and drawing to, and many that I printed on tissue paper and glued into bigger stories and mixed media pieces. I even used the discard painted paper to build some cairns on boards! Nothing goes to waste in this process. I do have some paintings that do not utilize the gel plate prints, too.
This series of work has been so much fun to create, and this show represents a moment where the gel plate has taken front and center for a chunk of this year. I hope you enjoy it.
Anyway, it should be a lot of fun at the gallery this weekend!
I will post images of all of my work for sale, along with photos of everyone else’s work in the gallery, once we install the show.
Oh, and I will be a participant in the Harvest Pop-Up Makers Market at OPAL next Saturday from 10:00 am – 6:00 pm. I will be selling small pieces, extra small pieces, ornaments, cards, and packages of collage papers, alongside several other artists and makers of fine things. We will be out in the courtyard and in the gallery. Stop by and check it out, as it is also part of the Fall Fundraiser “Garden of Ghosts” going on all day and that evening. See here for details – https://www.oakparkartleague.org
