Florence/Somerset: Breehan James & Barbara Sullivan

Barbara Sullivan. Happy Chair, 2021. Shaped fresco. 37 x 22 x 4 inches.
Breehan James, Cottage Book: East Bass Lake, 2021. Acrylic gouache on paper on panel. 10 x 13 inches. 

 

It is our greatest pleasure to announce a new exhibition of the work of Breehan James and Barbara Sullivan, Florence/Somerset which opens to the public on Friday, August 18th with a reception from 5-8pm at The Alice Wilds.

This will be the first time that either artist has shown their work in our space, and we could not be more excited to have this opportunity to bring forth this conversation between artists. We are also honored to have Emily Lanctot, artist, educator, and director and curator at Northern Michigan University – DeVos Art Museum lend her insightful words on the artists and their exhibition.
 
Florence/Somerset is a personal invitation to the rural counties where the artists Breehan James and Barbara Sullivan make work. Florence County, Wisconsin, near the border of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, is revealed in a series of intimately scaled paintings focused on the details of James’s family cottage and its woodsy surroundings. While Somerset County, located smack dab in the middle of Maine, is where Sullivan lived and worked for many years inspiring her nearly life-size fresco reliefs.
 
The textures of memory and place, as well as overlooked and sometimes iconic objects, are the exhibition’s heart. The paintings examine the subtleties of domestic life inside while looking out at the natural world. James’s cottage and the local environs are slowly revealed linearly along a horizon line in the gallery through a series of book-page-sized acryla gouacheⁱ paintings. James employs the form of the book as a tidy way to organize and amplify the narrative. At the same time, she smartly expands the space, borrowing tricks from art history like using mirrors to extend the gaze and page breaks to enlarge and provide detailed views. And Sullivan’s natural interlocutors — skunks, beavers, fawns, and birds — float and roam along the gallery walls in the form of Sullivan’s frescoes. Sullivan uses frescoⁱⁱ to recreate and elevate familiar domestic objects and creatures from the natural world in a moveable way. Each bas-reliefⁱⁱⁱ serves as an element of a larger story or scenario. Reordering creates new contexts and narratives. Together their works describe what it feels like to be in two places at once.
 
The artists’ records of noticing unfurl through the transformation of traditional materials — minerals, pigments, polymers, bits of earth, silica, lime, paper, and wood — coaxed into a vocabulary of familiar things. Everything is in focus. Color is saturated and representational but intensified and bright to reinforce the emotional qualities present in the object or scene. There is no atmospheric perspective, and details are enhanced rather than omitted.
 
The surfaces of the works are layered. Nuanced descriptions of rural and domestic places reveal insider information. Details gathered over years of observation are conveyed in a relatable and straightforward approach while demonstrating how experience, language, and memory can be slippery. A deer walking through the gallery jars and delights as it points out our ideological constructs concerning space. The speckled off-white pattern of a drop ceiling in a bedroom, a well-worn towel hanging between two trees, the look, and somehow the feel, of a soft but loud pattern on clothing or the fabric of a wingback chair, a Bialetti coffee pot, and the family dog taking up space and going at their own pace, are some of the small vignettes in Florence/Somersetthat shed light on the particulars of the everyday. The past is always present as the artists share how objects hold memory and celebrate how it feels to live with and cherish ordinary things.
 
Born in the Fox River Valley in Wisconsin, Breehan James lives in Maine with her husband, two sons, and their two dogs. James earned her MFA from Yale and her BFA from Massachusetts College of Art. She teaches in the Painting Department at Boston University. James has participated in numerous residencies, including at the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Norway and the National Gallery of Canada. She was awarded artist-in-residence fellowships at Arts in the Park at Quetico Provincial Park, The Stowe School in England, and the Vermont Studio Center. James shows her work internationally.
 
Barbara Sullivan lives and works in mid-coast Maine. Sullivan earned her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and her BA from Montserrat College of Art and the University of Maine, Farmington. Sullivan learned fresco painting at The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, where she was the head cook for eight summers. Sullivan recently retired from teaching Drawing and Painting at the University of Maine, Farmington for twenty-two years. She continues to teach fresco workshops including at The Aspen Institute, Pratt Institute, Colby College, Bowdoin College and in the University of Maine system. She has been awarded both the Adolf and Ester Gottlieb Foundation and the Pollock Krasner grant. She has participated in residencies including the Surf Point Foundation, Ellis Beauregard Foundation, the Tyrone Guthrie Center, in New Bliss, Ireland, Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Sullivan exhibits her work internationally and is represented by Caldbeck Gallery.

 –     Emily Lanctot

 
i) Acryla gouache is an opaque painting medium that contains acrylic but can be used like watercolor, increasing layering capabilities.
ii) Fresco is painting on freshly spread moist lime plaster with water-based pigments. Fresco comes in two types: in fresco secco (“dry fresco”), drywall is soaked in limewater, and lime-resistant pigments are then applied; in buon fresco (“good fresco”; buon fresco is also called “true” fresco), used by Michelangelo in his 16th century Sistine Chapel frescos, pigments are fused directly with wet plaster. The medium of fresco was traditionally commissioned by patrons and created site-specifically to tell linear religious parables and mythological stories. “Fresco.” Merriam Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fresco, accessed July 24, 2023.
iii) bas-relief – a sculptural relief in which the projection from the surrounding surface is slight and no part of the modeled form is undercut. A penny is an example of a bas-relief; “Bas-relief.” Merriam Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bas- relief, accessed July 24, 2023.