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CHANCE ENCOUNTERS
B. AMORE

and

HUMORASSOUS
WALTER KOPEC

May 3 – May 31, 2024
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 4, 2-6 pm
Third Thursday Reception
and artists’ talk: May 16, 6-9 pm

Atlantic Works Gallery presents two side-by-side solo shows from two member artists who have been using images and text throughout the course of their careers, but in entirely different ways. Amore, a former academic who taught for many years at the MFA Museum School, uses text in a poetical form, both in streams and bits and pieces. Kopec, who worked as a graphic designer, in his words, “…explores language (semantics and wordplay) and graphic iconic imagery and offers laconic commentary (toeing the line between the comic and tragic) on the doleful and farcical wallow of our Humorassous.”

In Chance Encounters, Amore delivers the span of her work combining disparate materials into a sculpturally artistic whole. With her series, Stepping Stones, Amore starts with photographs of faces that she made over a span of many years in Boston, New York, Singapore, Paris, Japan, along with photographs from old history books.  “No one is famous.  Everyone is anonymous.  The panels were created during the Gulf War and made in protest against that war and in sympathy for the destruction of life,” Amore said. Her text address immigration, a political flashpoint that continues today, as people were displaced from their homeland during the Middle East war. “These panels seem very relevant to me today as the Israeli/Hamas war drags on,” Amore said. “Day after day, the death toll rises and more people are displaced.  The words that stream across the panels still ask the same eternal questions, ‘Where is home?’ ‘Are we so different if we lie buried next to each other?’”

Additionally, Amore is exhibiting work from her new series, Chance Encounters, from which her exhibition takes its name.  “Just as the faces of the Stepping Stones panels have found their way together by chance, all of the elements of the new series have also found their way through chance,” she explained. “I am constantly observing the sidewalks and streets where I walk and picking up the flotsam and jetsam of what has been discarded.  The old saying, “One person’s trash is another person’s treasure” is true in my case, as all of these finds have made their way into a piece of art.”

Whereas Amore views events from a distance that gives the viewer room for contemplation, Kopec employs immediacy and starkness, like the pop of a string of firecrackers, leaving us in the end with an emotional, world-weary viewpoint. “How did it come to this? This place where much of the most “advanced” culture in the history of the world has seemingly become a society of muddle and murk?” Kopec asks. “Where many seem to crave the spotlight as stand-up comics, where answers to serious questions are lip-synched or sunk into sound bites, jargon, and jokey one-liners?”

Still, the artist, despite all odds, remains hopeful. Humor, no matter how dark, can act as a shield. “Constructed using concept-appropriate materials, my work explores language (semantics and wordplay) and graphic iconic imagery and offers laconic commentary (toeing the line between the comic and tragic) on the doleful and farcical wallow of our Humorassous,” he said. “While the individual pieces don’t suggest answers, the work references the frolic of contemporary “reality” and “reasoning,” commenting with a droll yet serious eye on issues from “Books Behaving Badly in Florida” to “When Evangelicals Speaketh…” and the “Lament” of a hopefully bluer sky ahead.”

Shown above: Walter Kopec, Glutton (left), B. Amore, Stepping Stones (detail, right)

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CONTEMPORARY
DIALOGUES

work by Rick Dorff, John Greiner-Ferris, and Joan Ryan
March 2 – 30

Opening Reception: Saturday, March 2, 2-6 pm
Third Thursday Reception: March 21, 6-9 pm
Stations of the XX: Saturday, March 23, 3 pm

Atlantic Works Gallery’s March exhibition will be Contemporary Dialogues, a group show of three of the gallery’s newest members, Richard Dorff, John Greiner-Ferris, and Joan Ryan. The exhibition examines multiple forms of artistic dialogue, and opens Saturday, March 2 with a reception from 2:00 – 6:00 p.m. and closes Saturday, March 30.  There will be an AWG traditional “Third Thursday”—the gallery’s friendly, cultural community get-togethers—on March 21.

Dorff is a visual artist and set designer who works in sculpture and installation, and in this exhibition his primary interest is with the space his work occupies and how that space and the objects themselves interact with one another. “By making these connections primarily through lighting and placement, objects and space create installations that extend beyond their own physical dimensions,” he explained.

On Saturday, March 23 at 3:00 p.m., in conjunction with Dorff’s work, Fort Point Theater Channel, where Dorff is co-artistic director, will present Stations of the XX , a work-in-progress performance piece using sound and movement.

Greiner-Ferris, a politically motivated visual artist who is informed by the theater, combines his love of images and words in assemblage. “You don’t lean back in a theater seat and say, ‘Entertain me.’ For the actors to do their jobs well, the audience has to be just as involved as the actors to give the actors something to respond to,” he said. “Nor do you walk into a gallery and just look at pictures on a wall. Pictures are something you engage with. The worst thing I could think that could happen to my art is if someone leaves the gallery and says, ‘Well, that was nice. Do you want to get some ice cream?’ I want people to discuss and fight about art.”

Ryan uses painting and drawing as a critical language to explore contemporary society, politics, and concepts of identity. In her most recent works, she incorporates a wide variety of images, cartoons, fairy tales, and political iconography combined with heightened color to confront the viewer at an intersection of a broad range of cultural moments. “This junction of imagery creates dynamic interplay and peculiar juxtaposition with the past and present,” she said. “We no longer live in a world of neat patterns , and my work imitates the way knowledge often comes to oneself, which is by fits and starts and indirection.”

December 15, 2023 – January 27, 2024
The Winter Show

Opening Reception: Thursday, 12/21, 6-9 pm, featuring music from Zumix 
Closing Reception: Thursday 1/18, 6-9 pm
Gallery Hours: every Friday and Saturday 2-6 pm
or by appointment: contact@atlanticworks.org
80 Border Street, East Boston, 02128

NOTE: Gallery will be closed December 29 and 30.

The Winter Show, featuring a wide selection of members’ work, will be opening Friday, December 15, and closing Saturday, January 27. The opening reception will be at the gallery on Thursday, December 21, 6:00 – 9:00 p.m. Most of the artwork will be for sale, in time for holiday gift-giving.

The gallery’s traditional “Third Thursday” receptions—friendly, cultural community get-togethers—will take place on December 21 and January 18, 6:00 – 9:00 p.m. The gallery is including live music and poetry reading to these two “Third Thursday” events.

East Boston musicians Brandon Anorga and Nora Janjar, members of the Zumix rock ensemble, Beware of Denise, will perform on the third Thursday in December—December 21.

On the third Thursday in January—January 18—gallery members B. Amore and John Greiner-Ferris will riff off each other in a poetry-reading duet called “A Baker’s Dozen.” Amore and Greiner-Ferris will read for a total of13 poems, improvising and building on each other’s written work. The poets will also provide pastries, hence the name, “A Baker’s Dozen.”

Screening begins at 7:00 pm (screen time, 1 hr. 5 min.)
Ten minute introduction by Mitchel Ahern
Q & A post screening
Costumes encouraged
Light refreshments served

For its October exhibition, the Atlantic Works Gallery (AWG), a collaborative of contemporary artists located in East Boston now in its 21^st year, is inviting the public to a special cultural event: The screening of a remake of the campy, American filmmaker Ed Wood’s iconic 1957 cult science fiction/horror film, Plan 9 From Outer Space with an introduction and Q&A with the filmmaker.

In May of 2014, Atlantic Works Gallery artist Mitchel Ahern was scheduled to exhibit a solo showing of his artwork in the gallery. Rather than hang a traditional gallery exhibition, Ahern enlisted artist members to build sets in the gallery, and casting gallery members and friends, he lovingly reshot Edward Wood’s cult masterwork. 

In the original film, space aliens seek to stop humanity from destroying itself by implementing Plan 9, calling for the resurrection of the dead. Plan 9 From Outer Space attained cult fame when it was dubbed “the worst film ever made” and “cinema so bad it’s good.”

But Ahern disagrees. “I think it’s one of the greatest films of all times, and I mean that unironically,” said the Boston-based visual and performing artist. “I think Wood’s filmmaking is extremely direct, improvisational, and flows out of a community. The dialogue is pure poetry.”

Nine years after its completion, Ahern’s remake is having its world premiere at the Atlantic Works Gallery. Ahern’s film serves not just as a tribute to Wood’s original film, it documents the 2014 Atlantic Works gallery, its members, visitors, and especially the East Boston neighborhood where much of it was filmed.