Edgewater Gallery in Middlebury celebrates women in art with its June exhibit “The Way We See It,” a group show on view at both Middlebury locations and featuring four artists whose mediums include photography, woodworking, painting and mixed media. Edgewater Gallery at the Falls (1 Mill St.) is showing the bold work of abstract, mixed-media artist Jane Davies and painter Alexis Serio, who creates vast, dream-like landscapes. At Edgewater Gallery on the Green (6 Merchants Row) photographer Kirsten Hoving is exhibiting a collection of photographs of flowers she has taken using her macro lens and Michele Kishita is showing works in painted wood. Each of these dynamic artists has found the medium by which she can best express and explore her ideas. “The Way We See It” presents four very different perspectives and celebrates the freedom women in art have today to present their ideas through their work.
“KALE FLOWERS,” A photograph by Kirsten Hoving
 
EDGEWATER ON THE GREEN
Middlebury College art history professor Kirsten Hoving’s collection of work for the June exhibit is from a series she has titled “Persephone’s Herbarium.” She writes: “I combine ancient myths of the seasons with the photographic study of flowers. Using a macro lens, I offer the privileged view of bees and bugs and goddesses.” Hoving chooses not to use the traditional recording methods of photography to capture the beauty and drama of her subject but instead in her close observations of flowers, she creates images that are not only rich, colorful and textural compositions but they also transform from an observed reality to photographs that suggest dreams, memories and suggestions.
“SUMMER RAIN” BY Michele Kishita
Exhibited with Hoving’s floral studies are a series of paintings done on wood sheets by Philadelphia artist Michele Kishita. The natural beauty of the grain of the wood shows in each piece and is juxtaposed with sharp angles of intersecting lines of color. The viewer sees the history and beauty of the tree through the polished surface of the wood but the interruption in this surface, that the lines of color provide, create exciting contrasts. Kishita states: “I strive to tease out the landscape that is inherently a part of each panel, while expressing the visual contrasts and harmony where man-made structures and nature intersect.”
EDGEWATER AT THE FALLS
“TWO LITTLE FEET (to carry me away)” by Alexis Serio
Edgewater’s Mill Street location features the abstract art of Jane Davies and a collection of landscapes from Alexis Serio. Rupert resident Davies’ abstract canvases, panel pieces, and works on paper are studies of color relationships, line, scale patterning and texture. She is equally comfortable working on a 36-inch-by-36-inch canvas as she is creating a 4-inch-by-4-inch mixed-media panel. Each piece whether large or small has an energy that comes from the dynamic relationships between color, shape, line and layering.
Davies writes about her work: “I see these pieces in terms of landscape. They don’t start out that way in my mind; I just start painting and see what happens. My conversation with the canvas always ends up in an unexpected image, and sometimes the image suggests a specific place or feeling. Oddly, the ones with the bright, warm reds remind me of snow and lava, freezing cold and deadly fire in the same breath. The more neutral, muted pieces (the works on paper) suggest coastal environments of rocks, sand and seaweed. I leave them open to interpretation by the viewer.”
Serio, a professor at the University of Texas at Tyler, is a graduate of Syracuse University, College of Visual and Performing Arts, and received her MFA from the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Fine Arts. The artist paints large, dreamlike landscapes. The works are vast vistas of layered opaque and transparent color. Though recognizable as landscapes the line between reality and the imagined is blurred through Serio’s use of color and tonal relationships and her ability to play with light and shadow. She describes her pieces for Edgewater as “metaphors for memory.”
These are women who have taken the traditional and formal elements of landscape, color relationships, shape, line and pattern and have expanded on and explored each element to create art that is expressive and exciting.
For further information call the Merchants Row Gallery at 802-989-7419 or the Mill Street Gallery at 802-458-0098, email [email protected] or visit edgewatergallery-vt.com.