INDEPENDENT CURATION

Leah Piepgras: LOVER

March 30 - April 20, 2025

No Call No Show Gallery, Boston

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

COLLABORATIVE 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