Exhibition: July 31st through September 18th
***EXTENDED THROUGH OCT. 9th***
Reception: Saturday, July 31st from 4-6pm
The paintings in Maggie Mailer‘s solo show, The Balloonists present a post apocalyptic world whose beings live above the earth suspended by balloons.
For The Balloonists, Mailer’s fourth solo exhibition with Ferrin Gallery, Mailer uses her experience as the first resident artist at The Berkshire Museum, Pittsfield, MA. During the summer of 2009, Mailer spent two months painting in the museum. Drawing inspiration through interpretation, the paintings in her show incorporate elements from the museum’s collection of 18th century landscape and portrait paintings. Mailer reflects on her 20/21st century life through the narratives related by her choices of subject matter and content. Portraits of women and children, dreamy landscapes and romanticized views of beauty are offset with symbolic references to distant threats.
Mailer explains the show title, “The paintings themselves are balloons, vehicles of levity, escape and suspended motion, and suggest a kind of travel by way of color. Color performs as a character, alongside figures culled from art history, in narratives about immortality, flight, and magical architecture. If my paintings in my previous show, The Volcano Sitters, were meditations on disasters in the far-off distance, The Balloonists are a playful answer to a calamity which has finally arrived.”
Mailer is one of the region’s well known contemporary artists. After graduate school she returned to Pittsfield and established her studio on North Street. A number of other artists began to work in empty store fronts. In 2003s she created the Storefront Artist Project and became an early contributor to the revitalization of Pittsfield.
In 2007 responding to the vibrant growth of the arts in Pittsfield the gallery chose to relocate to the city. Ferrin Gallery, is now located in a former storefront artist studio in what is now known as the upper North Street neighborhood. With a full schedule of contemporary art shows and related programming the gallery has become an active participant in the revitalization of the city.
The daughter of author Norman Mailer and jazz singer Carol Stevens, Mailer will discuss her artistic heritage during the DISH+DINE @ Ferrin Gallery on Tuesday, August 24th. She will be joined by painter, Nanny Vonnegut, the daughter of Kurt Vonnegut.
