Announcing this years Sculpture in the Park Artists!

Sculpture in the Park Opening Reception  will take place on Saturday October 11th from 1 - 3 pm at Franklin Square Park in Boston's South End.

Participating artists include:

Andrea Zampitella

“What remains of a home?” refers to the text in Gaston Bachelards “Poetics of Space.” Bachelard speaks to the primitive feelings of pleasure and well- being in refuge that take us back to our animalistic states.

As humans we marvel at the intricacies of the nest structure and the remarkable skill that it takes to build a nest. The nest symbolizes well-being, confidence and potential. The dire state of the earth amidst global warming forces us all to reexamine what comfort means and at what expense. Bachelard compares the image of the nest to that of the world and states that “mankinds nest is never finished.”

My work explores the threshold of pain and beauty, natural and manmade, domestic comforts and abject fears. Through various materials I explore the fine line between reality and the unknown. Natural resources such as sticks twine and cotton are juxtaposed with jarring artificial materials. This tension echoes a psychological relationship to the home and the melancholy felt in its abandonment. As we grapple with the state of our earth, we must remember to nurture our natural world.

Clyde Bango

Whatever is now, is forever.

The preservation of memories does not influence the reality of their existence in the past. How pretentious of me to make artwork dependent on my mind, as if it keeps my truths intact. Surely, memories experienced now cannot be the exclusive reality.

Why do I get to choose what my past is, when I had no control what my past was? I’m here now. Time inevitability cutting through fade, and some beauty ceasing to recur. Like the day I was born. Was it so pretty, my mother’s pain? Yet she is proud, just as she was, so she is forever. Her tears are sweet, unlike my father’s sweat; sour and curdled. Yet he remembers just as proud. Longsuffering laborious pains, all to sound a faint echo in eternity. Pretty much romantic tragedy to me. But his take on hard working is clear and loud. Vivid in my fibers. As loud as my days of mischief, barefoot by the edge of the field. Little thief, barely up to good upon neighbors’ fences. It is a laughing matter now, even a piece of art. But when it was, it was no-good forever.

Freedom Baird

In a pre-cooked society it is subversive to take a long time. Neck-deep in digitalphantasm, it is subversive to engage directly with your hands. In a society that fetishizes danger, it is subversive to be safe. And in a society that mass-markets subversiveness, I find it necessary to send roots into the neutral place, into the patient, examined place.

I am currently investigating moments of agency, of choosing. Specifically, I’m working with those charged moments where, in a person’s relationship to another person, situation, or substance, a problematic choice is being made. Moments of physical violence, consumerist excess, substance abuse, environmental abuse. Moments where time distorts, emotions flood, control is elusive. I am addressing this reclamation of agency by designing, building, and exploring the use of prosthetics and utensils. The objects I’m making are performative, relational, psychological.

One of the most potent things an activist can do is to put people in closer touch with their own agency, with their own power to choose, and in particular, with the ability to choose not to do or use something. In a culture of unbridled excess, abstention is power.

Jessica Gaddis

By altering everyday materials that are typically discarded, they can be viewed in a different light. This perspective can inspire new definitions of what is waste and what is beautiful.

This sculpture is a single prototype that hopes to have many more new friends that hang in between two trees from clear fishing line. Located on the East side of the park, the rising sun helps this sculpture sing.

This piece is made from once used plastic lids that typically house food, and is then painted with acrylic medium, mixed with sparkly mica and reconstructed to emulate diamonds, geodes or shells. Emulations of natural found objects strengthen the association and understanding that everything comes from and returns to the earth.

Kyle Browne

By engaging directly with place and material I see the act of creating as a visceral performance in which the final outcome pales in comparison to the process.

Art becomes the experience of walking, collecting, sitting, observing, manipulating and meditating. These intuitive movements create a dialogue with place... ants liberally crawl on my legs and moths bat their wings in a dance on the drawing paper. My touch penetrates soft decaying wood and explores grimy, sea-salted plastic. Hollow negative spaces stamped into synthetic artifacts and the pungent aroma of low-tide inform my subconscious creator.

Organic forms are derived from inorganic shapes and graphite or burnt wood serves as the raw material linking two contradicting forces between the manmade and nature. Working within limitations of environment provides opportunities for discovery, frustration, imagination, failure and understanding.

Milan Klic

The theme of wheel, vehicle, to me the most mysterious and intriguing of human contraptions, and spiritual entanglements associated with it, offer intrinsic metaphor of existence. Dreamlike constructs, primitive and frail in their execution and use of organic materials, they refer back to the origins of travel and to the dominance of automobiles in contemporary society.

Monica Mitchell

Phantasmagoria (noun):
Shifting series of phantasms, illusions, or deceptive appearances as in a dream or created by the imagination. Phantasmagoria is an imaginary space that feels intensely real. A person can imagine walking into or living within it’s walls. It can be an attractive space like Times Square or
IKEA or it can be a disorienting or repulsive place, also like Times Square or IKEA. This imaginary disorientating space is what I am interested in replicating. Every time I leave the house, browse the internet, or shop for groceries, I am bombarded with information on how to do all this. This excessive is presented in shiny seductive environments. By paying attention to color, pattern and form, one can learn how to live based on gender, marital status, age and profession.
My art making practice is an attempt to understand relationships between formal art making (ex. color, space and form) and its reflection of the world we live in. The work continues to develop with my personal associations and reflections about class, gender and consumerism. I use brightly colored patterned fabric, military fashion camouflage
patterning and duct tape to bring to the viewers’ attention the ideas what makes something phantasmagorical. My work is an exuberant investigation of this idea.

In Natural Habitat, cats climb and play in a tree, spreading their jarring and joyful color, attempting to assimilate into the wildlife of Franklin Square Park. Or are they trying to take it over?!

Wendy Wolf

Environmental concerns can develop from the unnoticed impact, and can only be altered through recognizing the problem and taking action.

I ask the individual to take time within a small part of the environment, to connect reciprocally with a time and place to deeper their understanding of the micro-systems just below the surface. I seek to make them slow down and see in a singular, micro way what people generally see in a macro way as they pass through. I ask people to slow down and see what is there, notice how a tree grows and changes; how two trees can grow into one large one; how a bug can create intricate trails and patterns. I seek to change how a person may forever pass by this place establishing an emotional and physical connection and memory.