Edgewater Galleries in Middlebury have reopened to the public and are showing new exhibitions in both galleries for June and July. Gallery managers do not plan in-person opening events for the shows but visitors can see them live. For those still cautious about where they go in public due to the coronavirus, Edgewater will continue to give customers the option to view the exhibitions virtually on our website. Both of the online exhibitions will be available to view by mid-June on its website, edgewatergallery.com.
“Reflections,” a group exhibition featuring artists Kathleen Kolb, Lori Mehta and Karen O’Neil, will be on view for the months of June and July at Edgewater Gallery on the Green, at 6 Merchants Row. The use and study of reflections is an important element in each of the artist’s collections, featured in this exhibition. Light is portrayed in a bold graphic style in Mehta’s figures, and it reflects off colored glass in O’Neil’s still life paintings, or off the water in the serene lake scene painted by Kolb, a Lincoln resident.
It is important to note also, that the work for this show was created during the height of the COVID-19 crisis and that the three artists found that the theme of “Reflections” took on meaning beyond the physical nature of light bouncing back off an object. All three women were affected by the weight of creating art during this unprecedented time and found themselves meditating, or reflecting on, what it meant to make art in this new reality. Art can serve as a refuge from what’s happening around us, or it can be a mirror of the outside world. Kolb, Mehta and O’Neil each felt the challenge of painting and persevering in this strange new era.
The second exhibit is “Three Summer Solos at the Falls,” three one-person shows by painters Hannah Bureau, Sara Katz and Jill Matthews. These works are on view in June and July at Edgewater Gallery at the Falls, located at One Mill St., just a few steps off Middlebury’s Main Street. 
Bureau, a RISD graduate, describes her paintings as just at the intersection of landscape and abstraction. She is interested in creating space and distance that feels like the familiar world around us but is ambiguous, general and abstracted. Katz, a North Ferrisburgh resident and assistant director of Burlington City Arts, says her paintings are often inspired by a sense of the landscape passing by as the viewer travels, resulting in images of roads, bridges and the streaking scenes on the edges of highways, with a paint quality that suggests a fleeting memory. A native Vermonter now living in Maine, Matthews is interested in art as a process and says her best work is based on an initial idea or vision, and succeed when she loses that security and the work is coming from within.