INDEPENDENT CURATION

Turning Spells: Audrey Goldstein & Dana Clancy

August 9 - 28, 2025

SHED presented by Jane Deering Gallery
Annisquam, Gloucester, MA

Turning Spells is a collaborative, site-specific installation featuring works by Audrey Goldstein and Dana Clancy. The show has emerged from an organic, ongoing dialogue between the artists and curator as well as the generosity of gallery director, Jane Deering.

Building upon mutual artistic concerns, Audrey Goldstein’s suspended sculptures from her Ephemeral Bodies series and Dana Clancy’s new series of mylar drawings and cut-outs, Cuttings, will activate the space in and around the SHED. Unbound by gravity, Goldstein’s sculptural lines weave together disparate materials such as silk, wood, wool and glass fragments. As dimensional drawings, the works move through space like undulating ouroboros– from thick to thin, opaque to translucent, hollow to dense. They echo hovering storm systems and teetering architectures, vascular circulation in the body and mycorrhizal networks beneath the ground.

Dana Clancy’s mylar silhouettes reintroduce imagery of cut flowers and open books into the garden landscape. These site interventions reframe and reflect their surroundings, playing the light to spark new perceptions of our learned relationships to nature. Rooted in perceptual drawing processes and the tradition of vanitas still life paintings, Cuttings: Drawings for the Air and Sun and Cuttings: Drawings for the Rain and Wind emphasize the human significance and absurdities of daily practice and small, deliberate gestures in response to meteorological and environmental changes. Clancy will introduce video projection activations during the evening reception on August 16th.

Turning Spells embraces the magic of temporary placemaking as an act of empathy, a call and response to a breathing landscape and its layered histories. The show opens the door to chance, a moment to be taken around–surrounded by–remnants of the past and the present all ringing out at different frequencies. It is an invitation for curiosity to become an inner and outer guide, an exploration of physical and ephemeral shelters, a mode of storytelling in which truth-bearing cycles intersect with pathways of invention.

Together, Goldstein and Clancy expand ongoing explorations in spatial movement, changing environments, and points of view while creating an unexpected interplay of forms, shape, light and shadow that evoke larger animating forces of both nature and fate.

Exhibition Credits

Gallery: SHED by Jane Deering Gallery
Artists: Audrey Goldstein and Dana Clancy
Curator: Stace Brandt
Gallery Director: Jane Deering

Installation photos courtesy of artists and curator

Leah Piepgras: LOVER

March 30 - April 20, 2025

No Call No Show Gallery, Boston, MA

LOVER is a video, sound, and sculpture installation introducing emergent works by Leah Piepgras. Moving towards “a new mythology for restoration and healing”, the show invokes reverence for nature in response to recovery processes, embodied sensory experiences, and the poetics of erotic love. In LOVER, Piepgras deepens her connection to sunlight, a source which tethers us to the cosmos and grants our survival. Studied scientifically as both particle and wave, light presents dualities that pass through us, calling into question our physical being. LOVER’s hypnotic video projections echo this quality. As particles dance, humans entwine, sprawl, and reach, and a wanderer treads barefoot through streams, each body exists doubly as a touchable form and as mere light.

In this exhibition, Piepgras premieres a diptych of video projections: “Sun Lover” – a collaboration with LA-based choreographer Megan Paradowski – and a solo video/sound piece, "Light From The Eye of God" (2025). "Light From The Eye of God" features extraordinary original footage of natural landscapes coupled with light particles filmed inside an Elekta Linac machine during the artist's cancer radiation treatment. The duration of the video is 8 minutes and 40 seconds, the length of one of the artist's treatment sessions. The piece's audio overlays the Linac machine's whirs with the drone of harmonic meditation chants from David Hykes' 1983 album, Hearing Solar Winds. Piepgras reveals an otherworldly resemblance between these two sources of healing.

Piepgras writes: I first heard David Hykes's music when I was 16 in 1986. It was a time of intense sorrow and it brought me great comfort through listening meditation. I was shocked at the similarity to the sounds that I heard when receiving radiation...In the chamber’s liminal space I imagined what I had already seen. Things of such great beauty and phenomenon filled me with intense hope, longing, and love for being in my body and on this planet, in this universe."

press //

“Here comes the sun” - Cate McQuaid for her substack, Ocean in a drop

“Body, Light, and Other Portals: On Leah Piepgras’s Sensory Light Realms” - Jane Freiman for Boston Art Review

Exhibition Credits

Gallery: No Call No Show
Artist: Leah Piepgras
Curator: Stace Brandt
Gallery Director: Andy Li
Technical Producer: Babisa Adumbire

Installation photos by J-M Leach Photo + Video

CO-CURATION

John Guthrie: EVOLUTION

May 13 - September 15, 2023

RSM Art Gallery, Bentley University

Co-curated with Danielle Krcmar

Over the last thirty years, Boston-based artist John Guthrie has developed a personal vocabulary of intractable geometric forms and rapturous color through series of abstract paintings. His deft compositions have roots in his early career as an aerospace engineer where he recognized the expansive possibilities of abstraction both in the visual arts and sciences. The beginning of Guthrie’s artmaking coincided with his experience coming out as a gay man during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. Within this period of continuous loss, strict social boundaries, and severe homophobia, Guthrie found openness in abstraction. Evolution presents a selection of Guthrie’s recent paintings, drawings, and studies. Each work stands as an ambassador for an ongoing series— a unique form in a visual lineage.

Part of the emergent Queer Abstraction movement, Guthrie’s work veers from convention by subverting the structures of the color wheel and the grid. Color and dimension change unexpectedly while autonomous forms shift between abstraction, figuration and the symbolic. Embodying queer ideology, Guthrie’s work transcends defined categories, existing as both hard and soft, geometric and organic, archaic and contemporary. In refusing total legibility and singular interpretations, Evolution operates beyond binaries, embracing a multiplicity of perspectives.

press //

“John Guthrie’s ‘Evolution’ brings together the unexpected” - Cate McQuaid for The Boston Globe

Exhibition Credits

Gallery: RSM Art Gallery, Bentley University
Artist: John Guthrie
Curators: Stace Brandt and Danielle Krcmar

Installation photos by Julia Featheringill