Arts
Visual Art
Galleries
The Christopher Brodigan Gallery
Gallery hours: The Brodigan Gallery is open 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. on weekdays. The Brodigan Gallery is free and open to the public.
For more information please call Groton School at 978-448-3363.
For more information please call Groton School at 978-448-3363.
Winter Exhibit
Effulgence
Works on paper by Fred LiangJanuary 13–March 6, 2020
Fred Liang's work, using traditional Chinese paper cutting or Jianzhi as well as Song Dynasty scroll paintings, intertwines Eastern and Western philosophy, art and science, and both ephemeral and concrete references to places near and far.
Some pieces examine the interwoven connections between Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay, Nature, and Taoist poetry, which merges the intellect and soul through their relationship with nature’s forces large and small. Liang believes that self-expression, identity, and social structure are rooted in nature’s rhythms and sow the seeds for our creative and spiritual existence.
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The De Menil Gallery
The de Menil Gallery at Groton School, a public gallery that opened in October 2001, is a cultural resource to the Town of Groton and the region. Designed by Perry Dean Rogers/Partners of Boston, this state-of-the-art gallery has approximately 900 square feet of exhibition space.
During each academic year, the de Menil Gallery hosts three exhibitions; they showcase a variety of media, including photographs, paintings, prints, and decorative arts. The de Menil Gallery is located at the Dillon Art Center at Groton School, a mile and half south of Groton Center on Route 111. Enter at the first gate to the right. Parking is available either behind the Art Center (a silver-roofed building) or at the Groton School Athletic Center, a short walk away.
Gallery hours: The de Menil Gallery is open 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on weekdays (except Wednesdays) and 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on weekends (except school holidays). The de Menil Gallery is free and open to the public.
For more information please call 978-448-7ART or Groton School at 978-448-3363.
During each academic year, the de Menil Gallery hosts three exhibitions; they showcase a variety of media, including photographs, paintings, prints, and decorative arts. The de Menil Gallery is located at the Dillon Art Center at Groton School, a mile and half south of Groton Center on Route 111. Enter at the first gate to the right. Parking is available either behind the Art Center (a silver-roofed building) or at the Groton School Athletic Center, a short walk away.
Gallery hours: The de Menil Gallery is open 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on weekdays (except Wednesdays) and 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on weekends (except school holidays). The de Menil Gallery is free and open to the public.
For more information please call 978-448-7ART or Groton School at 978-448-3363.
Winter Exhibit
The Carnival at the End of the World
Photographs by Nicholas Kahn and Richard SelesnickJanuary 9–March 3, 2020
Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick work primarily in the fields of photography and installation art, specializing in fictitious histories set in the past or future. Their winter exhibit features a fictitious cabaret troupe, the Truppe Fledermaus, who travel the countryside staging absurd and inscrutable performances in the abandoned landscapes beyond the town’s edge. To create this Theater of Memory, the Truppe are as apt to commemorate the passing of an unusual cloud as they are to be found documenting their own attempts to flee the rising waters of a warming planet, or using black humor to comment upon the mass extinction of bats and other animals.
The original Theater of Memory, as conceived by Italian philosopher Giulio Camillo, reduces the audience of the drama to a single member, using the performance taking place there as a mnemonic device to deconstruct the world around us. In addition to using this concept to address ecological themes, Kahn and Selesnick use it as a metaphor for how seemingly inexhaustible quantities of information are disseminated to us in the modern world. Apocalyptic weather is documented to the point of extinction; we are bombarded by endless images of our own virtual lives, constantly rebroadcast to us over our various devices. The artists present their own version of this pictorial feed in the form of "100 views of the Drowning World," a play on Japanese Ukiyo-e prints, in which the central concept, of a floating world of pleasure and beauty, is inverted to become one that is in fact sinking into the marsh, a place where there are no famous scenes or actors, and one viewpoint becomes interchangeable with any other.
The Truppe travel on, performing for nobody, advertising their performances through posters and handbills—performances that never happened, an endless preview reel for a mock-life that never was, for a film that does not exist. Within this nonexistent documentary, the viewer might glimpse of the collaborators' working life and neuroses,—all presented as an incomplete novel-in-progress, perhaps found in the attic of the Memory Theater itself.
Kahn and Selesnick have been working together since they attended art school at Washington University in St. Louis in the early 1980s. They have participated in more than one hundred exhibitions worldwide and have work in more than twenty collections, including at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Houston Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian Institution. In addition, they have published four books, Scotlandfuturebog, City of Salt, Apollo Prophecies, and 100 Views of the Drowning World.
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