Phyllis Ewen - Artist - Blog

SONATA: Drawings During the Pandemic

7/26/2020

SONATA is showing at AMP Gallery i Provincetown June 25 – July 21, 2021.
Here is an article in the Provincetown Independent about this work.
Here is a pdf of a catalogue of SONATA designed by Susie Nielsen of FARM Project Space in Wellfleet MA

I - Chaos
II - Resilience
III - Loss & Renewal

Phyllis Ewen’s recent drawings in “Sonata” are in many ways revelatory. These eloquent and evocative visual entries span a year wrought with enormous hardship and change. Working on graph paper, each work is like a rough-cut recording of a single note sounding a moment in time. Scientific, tonal and organically explosive, “Sonata” distills through meditative mark-making the beauty that can be found in chaos.
– Debbie Nadolney, director and curator of AMP Gallery, Provincetown MA

Sonata is a marvelous new series of drawings. Tender weight of line and lyrical gesture are the scaffolding for powerful political statements that are also deeply personal. It is a complex and unexpected dynamic that gives Ewen’s art the power to effect change.
- Barbara O’Brien
Former Executive Director, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art

As 2020 unrolled before us, around us, and in us, with its incipient fascism, its ravaging disease, its exposure of racism, Phyllis Ewen mapped it in drawings. Recording our national catastrophe, and with it our seasons, growing things, the possibility of life: she has faithfully kept in sight the fact that the coronavirus looks like nothing so much as a grain of pollen. What would I have done without her translations of our fears and passions? Not cameos or snapshots, but taken together, an epic. "Epics record, “sing of,” shape the fall of human worlds, and sometimes their foundations.

The shape that emerges from this sequence of images is a map of the United States, outlined in the names of murdered Black folks, deluged by waves, smothered with chrysanthemums, disintegrating into embers, bursting apart with rage--or is it energy? We are still here, in a dangerous space between worlds, one damaged and one (or more) possible: it’s fitting to close this series with one covert map made of tulips and another smothered in viruses. We are exploring still.
Mary Baine Campbell,
Poet, Professor Brandeis University

Curating an Exhibition

2/4/2020

The exhibit, Natural Attraction took place at the Brickbottom Gallery March 5 - April 4, 2020. I proposed the idea to Debra Olin, Gallery Director in September 2018. The idea was introduce artists I knew from Cape Cod to my community at Brickbottom in Somerville. I chose five artists whose inspiration came from the natural world, but were not landscapes in the traditional sense. Four live on Cape Cod and one lives in Boston, but is deeply involved in the woods surrounding the city.

somerville.wickedlocal.com/news/20200220/somerville-artist-explores-natural-world-in-upcoming-brickbottom-exhibit

My Proposal - now updated for use as the gallery's press release

I have long been interested in how our imagination and memories interact with the natural world. For this exhibit, I have chosen 5 artists who celebrate the diversity of this world through thoughtful observation and interpretation.  Each artist’s work is a commentary, as well, on how we see.

Four of the artists live on Cape Cod and their studio practice is influenced by their location. Robert Shreefter lives in Wellfleet.  He is primarily a print-maker, whose techniques include both silkscreen and drypoint/monotype. His sensitive multilayered images often include bits of poetry and reflect his earlier work as an English teacher. Nature for Shreefter becomes a metaphor for representing his relationships to words and narrative meaning. Truro painter Nancy Berlin’s colorful series is called ‘Flying by: A birder’s notes”. A neophyte bird watcher, she sees glimpses of colors and forms at the periphery of her visual field and is left with a fragmented memory.  On top of historical birding guides, Berlin has overlaid abstract composites of color and form, almost obliterating, yet hinting at, the presence the bird itself.  Sculptor, Susan Lyman, lives and works in Provincetown.  She writes, “Ever since I moved to Provincetown in 1981, trees and woods – and the greater botanical world - have given me source, material, inspiration, and solace. I scavenge my materials at the beach, in the woods, and at local tree dumps”.  In her animated beautifully rendered sculpture, she laminates, carves and constructs these materials into hybrid relationships with botanical forms that mimic the sensuality and imperfections of the human body.

Terry Gips, and Prilla Smith Brackett observe nature up close.  Terry Gips, who lives in Mashpee, uses cameras and scanners to record and remember what she finds: plant specimens including details of roots, blossoms, and leaves; samples of rocks and minerals; views of water, ice, and soil.  These images are enlarged and can become portraits of a particular specimen or used as a starting point for a work that becomes highly abstracted.  Although Prilla Smith Brackett lives in the city of Boston, she has profound connections to the woodlands surrounding the urban nexus.  In her complex layered prints, she transforms botanical images with lithography, chine-collé, stencil, and hand painting. The series “The Mind’s Garden” and “What to Do?” are about not knowing and are connected to recent upheavals in her life. These images come from a deeply personal space

These five artists are professionally active and have exhibited widely, but they are new to the Brickbottom Gallery.

Phyllis Ewen DEEP TIME at Kingston Gallery

8/9/2018

I have been invited by Linda Leslie Brown to show my recent work exploring the topography of the ocean floor, DEEP TIME, as a guest artist at the Kingston Gallery in October, 2018.
Linda, a member of the gallery, will be showing in the Main Gallery. The title of her exhibition, Plastiglomerate, is adopted from the name of a new substance created through heat fusion of plastic bits, sand, and other materials. It has been identified as a new form of rock said to be a geological marker of the Anthropocene era.

From the Press Release
Guest artist Phyllis Ewen presents Deep Time, sculptural collages inspired by the movement of the earth's surface. With scanned and altered sections of ocean floor maps, Ewen delves into the science of anthropogenic climate change and its effect on land and water. Her palette comes from the deep ocean mountains, valleys, and canyons of the ocean floor. During the process of creating this thought provoking body of work, Ewen's chroma darkened, reflecting the collective mood of increasing global ecological dangers. Melting glaciers and warming seas have affected the sea floor, disrupting evolutionary Deep Time with the significant human impact on the earth's geology and ecosystems. To create this work Ewen digitally modifies cartographic images of ocean floor maps plotted in the 1950s and 1960s by geologist Marie Tharp. Fragmenting and reassembling her source material, Ewen adds paint to form an imagined dimensional underwater topography. The depth and texture in these works are both illusion and reality. Magnetically attached layers reference the magnetic anomalies of the earth's tectonic plates on the ocean floor.

IN THE CENTER GALLERY
Phyllis Ewen: Deep Time
October 3-28, 2018
Opening Reception: Friday, October 5, 2018, 5:00-8:00 pm
Second Saturday BADA Event: October 13, 2018, 2:00-4:00 pm, Art in the Age of the Anthropocene: a Boston Art Dealers Association panel discussion Moderated by Sam Toabe, Gallery Director at UMass Boston's University Hall Gallery.

FLUX & FLOW Summer show at Off Main in Wellfleet

7/9/2018

I am pleased to be part of Off Main Gallery in Wellfleet MA, in its second season. Robert Shreefter, artist, and his partner, Wendy Luttrell, two of the people who opened the gallery in 2017, have reconfigured the gallery and made it stronger. They invited 9 other artists to be members of the gallery. Each artist will have a three-week solo show and otherwise have work in the main room during the season.
My show opened on July 21 with a talk by each of us. THE OPENING WAS WELL ATTENDED AND ENTHUSIASTIC. I've included the announcement and the press release below. My imagery refers to Cape Cod, the eastern seacoast of the U.S., and the volatile terrain of the Reykjanes peninsula of Iceland. I'm showing dimensional landscapes and archival pigment prints.

Off Main Gallery is housed in an 1875 barn in downtown Wellfleet. Beginning its second season, the gallery is a welcome addition to our vibrant gallery town.
The gallery’s mission is to think locally, exhibiting the paintings, collage, prints, photography of Outer Cape and other Massachusetts artists, including Phyllis Ewen, Terry Gips, Barbara Gordon, Kathleen Jacobs, Susie Nielsen, Susan LeFevre, Carol Ridker, Robert Shreefter, Jon Verney, Hanni Woodbury
www.offmaingallery.com/about/

"Our earth is not a stable entity; we live on its very mobile surface.
The natural world is far from settled but ever changeable"
From an essay by Ragna Sigurðardóttir
for Við Sjónarrönd Reykjanes Museum of Art 2017

From the Press Release

Ewen has chosen an apt title for her show: Flux & Flow.
As the works on display make clear, the movement of the earth’s surface is a source of inspiration and imagery for her. She explores anthropogenic climate change and its effect on land and water: rising seas, drying rivers, shifting coastlines and volatile geothermal terrains. Her abstract landscapes refer to Cape Cod, the Eastern seacoast, and the Reykjanes peninsula of Iceland. Ewen’s palette includes umbers, ochers, crimson, and sienna with occasional blues and greys. Maps, photographs and charts are turned into sculptural collages, allowing us to imagine ourselves within a dimensional landscape.
As she says, “To inhabit the world—or artwork—is an important way of understanding it.”

The Provincetown Banner publicized our exhibits with this ad.

VOYAGE - the dark ships move, the dark ships move

3/27/2018

Voyage is a series of unique mixed media digital prints, with graphite, pastel, and paint. I begun this series, after visiting the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC.
Voyage with the related series, Variations on Warming Oceans, comprise FOOTPRINTS.

FOOTPRINTS refer both to the impressions made over time by movement of the earth's tectonic plates and to the intrusion by humans that have further altered and shaped our evolving planet. I am looking at both our physical and social climates, the environments in which we live.
Hidden behind these modified digital prints, are maps made by geologist Marie Tharp of the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. I modify them first on my computer in Photoshop and then by hand, drawing with graphite, paint, and pastel. Through the layers, one can catch glimpses of the maps below. Although these maps are beautiful in and of themselves, they are evocative.
The maps have allowed me to imagine what is happening or has taken place in the terrain below and the sea above.
In Variations, I am looking at the seas in the context of human-induced climate change, I refer to the effects of warming waters and increased levels of methane that pose a great danger to our planet and our existence. In Voyage , I am considering the sea as a locus of migration -- the forced transport of human beings, as cargo, from Africa to North and South America through the 19th century, what is called ‘the middle passage’. The effects of this shameful history -- of the enslaved and the enslavers -- are still with us and poison our social climate.

This piece is included in PERSONAL GEOGRAPHIES, an exhibit at the Chandler Gallery in Cambridge, March 26-April 20, 2018.

"In DARK SHIP, Phyllis Ewen tells a very different story with a topographical map of the Atlantic Ocean overlaid with text about the Middle Passage. Though four continents are shown, only North America and Europe are labeled. Though a diagram of a ship is also shown, the hull is empty. This piece contrasts what is laid out visually, or mapped, with what is visually absent but present only in the text."

These are some of the others in the series, VOYAGE. More to come. Click on an image to Enlarge

SUMMER EXHIBIT IN MAINE - July 15-August 20, 2017

7/13/2017

gallery from the side

IMPRINT at the George Marshall Store Gallery, York ME

In February 2017, I received an email from Mary Harding, the director of the George Marshall Store Gallery, asking to visit my studio. She was planning to show the work of Somerville artist, Wendy Prellwitz, and was looking for someone whose work would be a complement. She has a good curator's eye and could see that our work would go together very well. We each approach landscape in our own way, yet Mary -- and we --could see underlying relationships that would unify the exhibit. Mary had been referred to me by Bill Brayton, with whom I had shown a few months before in the exhibit, Inventing 3-D Landscapes. (See my first two blog posts.) and arrived at my studio with the exhibit already in mind. This is not my usual experience when a curator comes to my studio and a very welcome one. The studio visit was just confirmation that the work, in person, was what she had hoped for from looking at my website. A shout out to my photographer, Dean Powell and my website designer, Keyworth Graphics. Mary invited me to visit the gallery before agreeing to show there.

When I went to York the following month, I was impressed by the beauty of the site and location and I loved the gallery. The main space is large, airy, and well-proportioned, the smaller spaces well suited to showing a sole artist or small work . I saw the 2016-17 Winter Show; a diverse collection of art well arranged. It was easy to decide that, yes, I did want to exhibit there.

In May, Mary came to Somerville again and spent time with both Wendy and me. The three of us visited both studios while Mary took photographs and decided on the pieces she wanted us to bring to Maine. We decided on an exhibition title : IMPRINT. " an exhibition making visual and thematic connections with the work by boston-based artists Phyllis Ewen and Wendy Prellwitz and New Hampshire ceramicist David Ernster." zine.artscopemagazine.com/artscope-magazine-ongoing/

IMPRINT was installed beautifully. As you come in, my work is on the left side of the gallery, Wendy's on the right One of my pieces was on a short wall on Wendy's side facing toward the main area and so allowed a few across the gallery to the installation of the majority of my pieces. The art on the walls is paired with arrangements of ceramic pieces that most resonated with our work. A small vestibule at the entrance had a work by each of us and you looked ahead to the wall with the two framed pieces of mine. Mary Harding is a gifted curator and a genius at using the space to best present the artwork.

Phyllis Ewen‘s mixed-media artwork is a fusion of art and science with an emphasis on the organic quality of nature. Her sculptural drawings present an exploration of the effects of global warming, such as drying rivers and rising seas. This subtle commentary on politics, society, and nature is a common thread throughout her work, no matter the medium.
www.georgemarshallstoregallery.com/phyllis-ewen-imprint/
Phyllis currently works in Somerville, Massachusetts at her studio in the Brickbottom Artist Building, of which she is a founding member.

The opening reception on July 15 was well attended - summer show. People wandered through the three exhibitions and out to the tents behind the gallery for food and drinks. Some of the gallery's 'regulars' had come in the days before to get a preview and both Wendy and I had sold a piece before the official opening. The ceramics continued to sell throughout the evening.

The July/August issue of ArtScope Magazine has a profile of the George Marshall Store Gallery which features our exhibit.
zine.artscopemagazine.com/2017/07/surprises-in-store-maines-contemporary-jewel/

ORKNEY: Beside the Ocean of Time

6/15/2017

NOTES TO MYSELF In order to keep a record of my research, I will keep notes on this blog page.

This project, which I learned about at an exhibit at the Pier Art Center in Stromness, Orkney, is provocative and a different way to think about issues of climate change in connection with long-term natural changes in the landscape.

How do individuals and communities understand Deep Time? A relatively short-term perspective is dominant in contemporary societies as they face the complicated ongoing consequences of landscape change on every aspect of the human life, from agriculture and provision of food and energy to the protection of natural or cultural landscapes. A more holistic and deeper knowledge is required.

http://www.cire.group.cam.ac.uk/Orkney

Orkney: Beside the Ocean of Time
The action of the sea is constantly reshaping and reducing the islands of Orkney, eroding the glacial till and the underlying sandstone. A continuous gnawing, but with moments of drama that thrust deep time into the full glare of consciousness.
At what temporal resolution should we view human activity? In order to understand the processes of change that shape the landforms under our feet and the resources upon which we depend, we need to think beyond the short-term time-horizons of rapid economic transactions and electoral cycles – the days, months or even years of human time. Yet, if we attempt to place human activity against the backdrop of Deep Time – the vast and gradual time-scale of Earth’s geological history – the temporal span of a human life almost disappears. This presents Science and Humanities scholars with a conceptual challenge. In attempting to understand how communities respond and adapt to landscape change, we need to understand the factors that shape attitudes and behaviour, and the present-day, immediate context in which people narrate their lives. Yet understanding change also requires a deeper time perspective, one that recognises long-term histories of human settlement, in the context of deep time ecological and geomorphological transformations. With short-term time horizons, the understanding of the places where we live can only be in relation to a single point in environmental history; as such we risk locking ourselves into single point assumptions. If we expand our time horizons, recognising environmental fluctuation, we will increase communities’ resilience to landscape change. How, then, might thinking with a Deep Time perspective destabilise present-day certainties, and how might researchers work together to expand the time-depth of their work while remaining sensitive to the temporality of human experience?
This project brings together perspectives from Social Anthropology, Literature, Archaeology, Palaeoecology, and Geology, working in collaboration with Orcadian artist Anne Bevan and our project partner, The Pier Arts Centre, to find innovative ways to investigate and represent time-depth in landscape, using Orkney as a model. The project will develop and pilot an interdisciplinary methodology that will enable new insights into Orkney’s rich literary, geological, palaeoenvironmental and archaeological heritage, which is coupled with contemporary concerns over coastal erosion and the political and economic importance of energy generation.

Research Questions:
1)      How do communities respond and adapt to landscape change?
2)      What is the time-depth of people’s engagement with place?
3)      How do we make deep time visible?

Artists Resolve -- a collaboration with Kimberly Dark

4/17/2017

Artists Re_Solve
Artists ReSolve addresses the divisions intensifying in the United States and brought into focus by the recent presidential election. The site gives artists– writers, dancers, visual artists, performers, composers, etc.– a platform to connect and collaborate in response to the current environment. Working with another person through a creative process can spark curiosity, critique, and new re_solutions towards a common good.
Artists Resolve put out a call to artists who wanted to respond to the current political situation by collaborating with another artist. It seemed like a good opportunity to engage with someone outside my usual circle and to use art in a more direct political statement.
I responded to their solicitation to collaborate and was paired with the wonderful story teller, poet, and teacher who lives in Hawaii, yet travels the world sharing her knowledge, passions and good vibes, Kimberly Dark.
We spoke by phone and she sent me three poems that I would interpret visually. I had at first thought that it would be fun and politically relevant to do a joint online action in support of Planned Parenthood. My wish was to find a way to invite people to donate to the organization and 'honor' Mike Pence who supported a nefarious bill that would defund Planned Parenthood and used his position to break a tie in the Senate.

I responded to their solitation to collaborate and was paired with the wonderful story teller, poet, and teacher who travels the world sharing her knowledge, passions and good vibes., Kimberly Dark.
We spoke by phone and she sent me three poems that I would interpret visually. I had at first thought that it would be fun and politically relevant to do a joint online action in support of Planned Parenthood. My wish was to find a way to invite people to donate to the organization and 'honor' Vice President Mike Pense who had just broken a tie in the Senate, in support of a nefarious bill that would defund Planned Parenthood.

When I received the poems, I chose this one. It spoke to me of the way in which beauty is made significant when it becomes part of collective action-- in this case political action.

My thinking about the poem and imagery.
how could your loveliness matter?
Become part of the sparkling crowd.
By becoming engaged, joining with others, being part of humankind, by acting.
And here I took the liberty of deciding to act on behalf of Planned Parenthood, both because Mike Pence had just broke the tie and it was being unfunded, And because the poem seemed to be about women, about you and me, and us. AND I wanted to use pink in the piece, a color that I almost never use in my work about water and land, with earth and azure colors.
Your action is part of you when you engage with others, like breathing, but takes work (sweating pretty)
Placing your beauty –- into the humming, chaotic, breathing earth, stormy
I envisioned the sea as a chaotic hurricane – the background images are of hurricane Sandy, which hit the East coast two years ago. And from another storm in the oceans.
The individual self is small (irrelevant, insignificant) and doesn’t mean much in the scheme of things -- nature, the universe, however it’s defined, but becomes meaningful in action, commitment.
resplendent in my insignificance. I changed the last line to 'resplendent ...[in] significance'

Kimberly and I submitted our collaboration to Artists Resolve.

Continuing FOOTPRINTS

4/5/2017

On Wednesday, several artist friends -- a group of women who regularly meet to discuss books, shows, and ideas -- came to the Creative Crossroads exhibit in the Brickbottom Gallery and to my studio to see and comment on some further pieces that I am working on in my studio. They asked about the process by which they were created, and the form of my collaboration with Elva and Soffia. I showed some of the original images I had created via Photoshop to illustrate the beginning of process of collaboration. I was encouraged to continue . I have some ideas for new imagery that I want to pursue --after going to a lecture at the Radcliffe Institute about ocean ecosystems --various plankton, whose behavior and genetic makeup are affected by global warming. Today, April 6, Janette Brossard, my good friend from Havana, came and we talked about wanting to see a huge wall of the panels, organized by hues and values. This is a goal for me.

Here is the way Variations 1-6 look in the Brickbottom Gallery.

I am very excited about my return to Iceland in September to work with Elva and Soffia at Hvitahús for a week. We will continue to expand our collaboration and talk about how to make visible aspects of global warming. Elva sent me 3 images of other panels from our collabotative piece, Horizon. She and I talked this morning about dates for my residency with her.

Elements like this would be included as part of a large wall that I hope we will create together.

Where MassArt and Brickbottom Meet

2/9/2017

I am excited about participating in this collective exhibition. It gives me the opportunity to show work from an ongoing project, FOOTPRINTS. For this showing, I have selected a grid of six 11"x 17" mixed media panels.
The piece is inspired by topographical maps of the ocean floor, first created by geologist, Marie Tharp in the 1950's. I used images found on NASA, Columbia University websites, among others. Modified first on my computer using Photoshop; and when printed, with graphite and pastels. The texts, equations, and images of methane molecules, rising seas and temperatures that I have added refer to the effects of global warming on the oceans.

CLICK ON THE IMAGES TO ENLARGE

FOOTPRINTS: Variations on a collaboration with Soffia Sæmundsdóttir and Elva Hreidarsdottir, May-November 2016
A version of the collaborative piece was shown at DUUS, Reykjanes Art Museum in Keflavik, Iceland,
November 15, 2016 - January 15, 2017. Our collaboration will continue.

CREATIVE CROSSROADS celebrates the artistic overlap between Massachusetts College of Art & Design faculty and alumni and the Brickbottom Artist Association (BAA) membership. Twenty-eight artists are represented. Known as MassArt, Massachusetts College of Art and Design is a publicly funded college of visual and applied art founded in 1873. It is one of the oldest art schools, the only publicly funded free-standing art school in the United States, and was the first art college in the United States to grant an artistic degree. I taught at the college for many years and continue my connection through friends still teaching there. I am delighted to be exhibiting with these artists and others that I know from Brickbottom in Somerville MA, where I have my studio.