We Are Lawrence

BUILDING COMMUNITY

Essex Art Center's picture

Date: 

03/11/2016 - 10:00am to 04/29/2016 - 6:00pm

Location: 

Essex Art Center
56 Island St.
01840 Lawrence , MA

Description of Event: 

The Elizabeth A. Beland Gallery Presents:

 
ONE SYSTEM + ANOTHER SYSTEM = SOMETHING ELSE

New sculpture by Therese Zemlin

Artist talk: 
Friday, March 11, 2016 - 5:00pm

 

March 11, 2016 to April 29, 2016

Opening Reception: 
Friday, March 11, 2016 - 5:00pm to 7:00pm

 

Therese Zemlin’s recent work combines the rational, symmetrical structure of platonic solids with branches and stalks of trees and other plants. The results are extraordinary hybrids of gesture, containment, harmony and tension.

From Therese Zemlin's Artist Statement:

"The tetrahedron and icosahedron are the sturdiest, and in my mind, the most visually dynamic of the five Platonic solids.  It doesn’t matter if the joints are flexible, the structure remains rigid in this elegant system.  Trees represent another system of rigidity and flexibility.  As I write this in October, I look forward to the leaves falling, exposing the webs and networks of triangulating branches, each branch a fractal-like pattern of increasingly smaller and smaller copies of itself, stretching to the sky.  
 
There is a creative, meditative and poetic aspect to collecting the branches that have fallen to the ground, building new, geometric structures from the branches, while maintaining something of the tree’s characteristics.  The resulting small, branched tetrahedrons and icosahedrons imply something larger, perhaps a world within a world."