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March 26 – April 20, 2024


Gallery I

Judith Greenwald

Displacement

March 26 – April 20, 2024

Receptions: Thu, March 28, 6-8pm

Sat, March 30, 3-5 PM

Displacement 11, 2022,16” x 16” x 2”, Oil paint and cold wax on cradled panel

To me, the work I do is a means of interpreting unsettling truths, of bearing witness, and of sounding an alarm. The beauty of formal representation both carries an affirmation of life and subversively brings us face to face with news from our besieged world.

—Richard Misrach 

Judith Greenwald has created a community of displaced figures, sometimes haunting and always suggestive of an unspoken narrative.
Each piece has been painted with a combination of oil paint and cold wax, a medium that lends itself to the experience of depth and complexity. The contexts in which these figures appear as well as the figures themselves are created with multiple layers, varying textures, and a range of color.
The figures are rendered as silhouettes— nameless and faceless— suggesting both their anonymity and their universality. They are the 130 million people displaced worldwide due to war, famine, oppression, and the climate crisis. They are the 15 million Syrians who have been forced to leave their homes to seek safety and who continue to live in dire circumstances. They are the nearly 7 million people internally displaced in Afghanistan and over 8 million who have left the country due to conflict, violence, and natural disasters. They are the people of South Sudan, over 4 million of them, who have been forced to leave their homes and the 5.8 million Ukrainians who are wartime refugees. They are the nearly 2 million people of Gaza, most of whom are internally displaced, and the half million Israelis who have been displaced by the same conflict. They are the 21 million people in Latin America and the Caribbean who have been forced from their homes due to persecution, gang and gender-related violence, and food insecurity. They are the over 3 million people in the U.S. who were displaced by natural disasters in 2023. They are the unhoused living on our streets.
These are the physical displacements that have become so characteristic of our times. There are emotional and spiritual displacements as well brought about by Covid, climate disasters, and the shift toward greater authoritarianism. All of these have created a kind of soul sickness on a large scale. None of us is free from displacement.
Greenwald calls upon us to bear witness— to see and acknowledge injustice and to show up with empathy, compassion, and solidarity at very least. Bearing witness inherently involves making visible those who are invisible and recognizing that each person has a story. Greenwald invites us to imagine the narratives that accompany each of these paintings and, in so doing, to join her in bearing witness to “this besieged world.”
—Judith Greenwald, Ceres Gallery, 2024 
The artist will be in the gallery Thursday, March 28 5-8; Tuesday April 2, 12-2; and by appointment.

Gallery II

Shirley Steele

PORTRAIT: MISSING PIECES

March 26 – April 20, 2024

Receptions: Thu, March 28, 6-8pm

Sat, March 30, 3-5 PM

Ceres Gallery is pleased to present the work of Shirley Steele.
This work is a video exploration of what it is like to restructure a self-portrait when there are important pieces missing. We humans are continually updating and reconstructing our own self-portraits. As we have new experiences, our existing model of our self becomes outdated and needs reimagining. If we add new things to our life, like learning to play chess or play the violin, we enlarge our self-image to reflect the new attributes. But what happens if we lose meaningful pieces (loved ones die, friends disappear)? How is it possible to reconstruct the model? How is it different? This work explores the messy and confused process of creating a new self-portrait with pieces missing.

Upcoming:

April 23 – May 18, 2024

Tapestry of Nature III / Endangered

Elizabeth Myers Castonguay

Connections

Marilyn Banner

Connection and Loss

Tanya Kravath