Seeing Landscape
Lapin Contemporary, North Adams, MA • lapincuriosities.com • Through December 28, 2024
This seemingly disparate, yet smartly edited exhibition is the fourth at what Cristina Barbedo calls her “emerging gallery” founded last April in North Berkshire’s historic Norad Mill. A Brazilian-born ceramist turned jewelry designer, Barbedo seeks out (by networking and trolling social media) visual artists who catch her eye, then links them with others who share stylistic or narrative traits to curate an exhibition. In this case, it’s a photographer, multimedia artist and graphic designer in Seeing Landscape.
John Lanterman, a Berkshire landscape architect for whom photography plays a supporting role, is the show’s lens man. His black-and-white images are riveting for the way cloud-splashed skies spill light over hills, meadows and groves of trees. In one, a tiny fragment of the moon hangs above roiling masses of shadow and light. In another, sunlight animates shimmering crowns of aspens.
Wilmington, Vermont-based painter and glass artist Jen Violette uses barn-shaped structures as visual tropes in multiple paintings and blown-glass pieces of blue, tangerine and lime. Often they rest on pillows of glass. In one significant departure, she positions a grove of glass trees in a grid suggesting human order imposed on nature.
Graphic artist Douglas Gilbert is Barbedo’s husband and business partner. They relocated from New York to Williamstown in 2022. His signature logo, a rabbit or lapin, inspired the gallery name. Gilbert coaxes shadowy, black-and-white images of hills, meadows and trees from thickets of crosshatched charcoal lines and dashes.
Although widely different in their chosen media, the three artists share common ground in expert craftsmanship and rural subject matter.
The rural aspect extends to mountain views visible through the loft gallery’s massive windows in the Norad Mill. Built in 1863 to process wool, the four-story mill is now a small-business shopping center. Its location on the Route 2 “Cultural Corridor” between MASS MoCA in North Adams and the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown is a strategic advantage, Barbedo says, in attracting New York and Boston-based visitors who tend to buy art. She also makes diverse use of the loft space with a studio for her jewelry making and a gift shop stocking her work and that of her husband as well other artisans.
“It’s all a work in progress,” Barbedo said. “I hope to grow a gallery.”
— Charles Bonenti