Past Exhibitions

Encounters: The Sacred in the Ordinary
Senior Thesis Exhibits | Class of 2024
On Display: April 30, 2024-May 11, 2024
Barrington Center for the Arts 

The Gordon College Art Program presents "Encounters: The Sacred in the Ordinary," a senior thesis exhibition in the large and small galleries at Barrington Center for the Arts and its surrounds. The visual art and design works on display in the gallery and beyond have been created by students who are completing an art major at Gordon. Each student considered which way of making they explored in their time at Gordon most piqued their interest, resulting in a diverse array of media that includes painting, printmaking, illustration, graphic design, industrial design, app design and more. The students also found ways to connect these media to ideas that matter deeply to them.

New Classical
On Display: March 14, 2024-April 18, 2024
Barrington Center for the Arts 

Works by Juliette Aristides and Robert Armetta

Juliette Aristides' Artist Statement: 

The nude gains its enduring value from the fact that it reconciles several contrary states. It takes the most sensual and immediately interesting objects, the human body, and puts it out of the reach of time and desire; it takes the most purely rational concept of which mankind is capable, mathematical order, and makes it a delight to the a delight to the senses. — Kenneth Clark

Looking at Greco-Roman figures in a museum we see people much like ourselves frozen in stone and time, sculpted millennia ago and yet sharing the most fundamental human connection to life in the body. Those ancient figures lived an embodied life in the world that was entirely physical- could they have imagined our digital age? Greek gods and goddesses were represented confident in their nudity exhibiting mastery in the world and although we have progressed in countless ways, our relationship to the nude, and perhaps ourselves, seems more fraught than in that mythic time. 

Carl Jung wrote that the physical body and spirit are ‘very old acquaintances in fact, pawns that for thousands of years have been pushed back and forth on the thinker’s chessboard’. We are bound to our bodies, the most fantastic leaps of imagination are tethered to something as mundane as health and life itself. Yet, our cultural dialogue about the human body is limited and conflicted. The art of the nude is a self-portrait of the artist and culture as much as a dream is a reflection of the dreamer. 

In the past three years we have navigated varying degrees of isolation that propelled many of us to spend more time behind a screen inhabiting a digital rather than physical space. This exhibition is an ode to the life in the body. The figure has remained the most enduring subject in Western art and will continue as long as artists continue to paint what fascinates us most. 

Roberts Armettta's Artist Satement: 

I’m interested in the way things look, particularly the way light reveals the forms of the objects around us. I try to capture the poetry of my sensory experience of a sitter, or of the landscape. Additionally, in my portraits, I try to communicate something of the character and dignity of the individuals I’m painting, that elusive quality that made me want to paint them in the first place.

I have found that, through my training and associations with art schools and other artists, there is an ever-growing coterie of like-minded painters who share many of my artistic interests, primarily my love of the art and craft of picture-making as it has been understood for centuries prior to the advent of modernism. My ideas are not antagonistic to modernism, just distinct from it.

I have recently been exploring sacred art as a means of melding my love of classical figurative art and my faith.

You Can't Get There From Here
On Display: January 13, 2023–March 2, 2024
Barrington Center for the Arts 

Recent Works by David West

About the Show:
A note from the artist:  
I have always been drawn to the landscape genre as a way to represent the pastoral and familiar. As someone who has moved a lot over the last twenty years, the familiar has been hard to come by at times. But, that has never stopped me from trying to familiarize myself with the places I have lived, mainly through drawing them. That is how this body of work began-lots of drawings of the places I have lived, looking for clues to the things hidden in the symmetries of land and sea, sky and root, and building and rock.  

You Can’t Get There From Here is a set of “landscapes” more than three years in the making. Formally started in the early days of 2020, in the months before the pandemic shifted our sense of space and time into uncharted territories, I began the first drawings that are part of this show. The pieces began as a meditation on the place that I had grown to love over the past few years, Gloucester, MA. As the pandemic wore on and we would ultimately move away, the ideas shifted from a meditation on that specific place to the “idea” of place-a kind of longing for a place that doesn’t exist here-be it physical, emotional or spiritual-an idea that seems constantly out of reach, just over the horizon.  

 In this body of work, I am working through the question, “What is a landscape if there is no identifiable “place?”” Where do the lines of truth and fiction, and hope and belief coincide to make longitudes and latitudes that plot not directions to a place, but rather paths to a wholly other possibility. 

About the Artist: 
David West is an artist, bookmaker, teacher and chief dishwasher. He enjoys drawing more than just about anything and considers sitting with a sketchbook and a friend about the best thing you can do. From 2015 to 2020 he was an associate professor of art at Gordon College where he was honored to work with good people and humbled to teach thoughtful students. After moving to New England he was surprised to learn he loved the beach, the snow and New Englanders. His wife, Jennifer, is the teacher he wants to grow up to be and his two daughters are both teenagers and would not appreciate being named here. Currently a resident of Alabama, having previously lived in Louisiana, Mississippi and Georgia, he is vaguely considering the possibility of South Carolina so he can complete the set. 

the There there
some places in America
On Display: January 20, 2024–February 23, 2024

the photography of Nubar Alexanian, Bill Franson, David Herwalft and Jean Schnell

It is an honor for Gordon College to host this new exhibition of four very seasoned photographers—all of whom have a deep commitment to, and insight about a peculiarly American sense of place. 

Nubar Alexanian speaks of his Gloucester series as a “love letter” and reveals in his work decades of genuine engagement with this coastal town and its people. He also explores the dis-place-ment of his background as an Armenian American, a familiar aspect of our national identity as a country of immigrants and asylum seekers.

Bill Franson speaks about “evidence of human fortune, tragedy, time past and a present place…” in reference to his exploration of the communities just surrounding the Mason Dixon Line––“spinning…sniffing the wind for revelatory suggestions of original intent” in the Line. (With its origins in colonial land dispute along with its present day economic depression.) 

Jean Schnell’s richly evocative images of Quaker meeting houses breath out the very silences that this mystic tradition embraced—and in so doing manages to fill the empty spaces in her photographs with a palpable sense of presence. Light itself becomes the place.

David Herwaldt’s images poignantly portray the itinerant life of an interstate trucker—with candid portraits of fellow drivers, truck stops and their regulars, and that strange (and wonderful) sense of place in the no-place of the nomadic life––itself a very American reality. 

All four of these artists communicate the layered, familiar-yet-strange feeling of what it means to live here –– in a land hard to define because its people are wildly diverse. The therein America is, as our concurrent exhibition by the painter David West suggests, an elusive thing. 

Bruce Herman
Curator and Director
The Gallery at Barrington Center for the Arts

How the Morning Itself Appears
On Display: November 6, 2023–December 16, 2024
Barrington Center for the Arts

Recent Works By Gregory Deddo

"When Greg Deddo joined the faculty at Gordon College a little over two years ago, he inherited an art program in transition with all senior art faculty retirig or leaving for another institution. He was also just starting out his vocation as a professor and his calling as an artist, having recently completed his MFA degree at Rhode Island School of Design. Yet there is a maturity in both his pedagogy and his art that could easily be associated with a more experienced person—a depth and nuance one associates with someone more settled and certain.

But Greg’s art is all about unsettling our certainties: notions of self and other, location and memory, action and interpretation, appearance and reality. And his work interrogates our notions of time and place and the sense of self that flows from the stories we tell (or fail to tell truly). The artist seems to ask, “What is real?” and points, in his multi-layered collage-like imagery, toward the ambiguities involved in how we remember and script our past to form an identity and chart a future for which we long. Family, geography, socio-economic status—the facts of our situatedness—this is the realm of discourse he questions with great insight via the layering effect of his images. He deconstructs our past and present even as he articulates that “inconsolable longing” that C. S. Lewis discusses in The Weight of Glory—a famous sermon delivered by the Oxford don only months after the Blitz destroyed so much of London and its people. This is longing for a better way—a world in which the fragments are rejoined and reveal the once and future harmony for which everyone yearns.

Deddo has not only physically blurred his fragmentary images but has also attempted to evoke the blurring of time and place and narrative—allowing his viewers to “cut and paste” their own stories and memories—something (he suggests) we are always doing consciously or unconsciously. All memory is constructed; layered, collaged. And our unfinished/ongoing stories are reflected in Deddo’s choice to leave areas of his paintings unpainted, scraped, or partially wiped-out. In each piece he seems to ask the questions that the French master painter Paul Gaugin poses in the famous (and monumental) masterpiece, Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous? (Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?). These first-level questions haunt all of Deddo’s work here and encourage us to become more aware of our constant reconfiguring, re-interpreting of events and relationships.

To drive this home forcibly, in one project Deddo invites other people to write stories to accompany snapshots of the artist’s own family—effectively fictionalizing the persons and events in those images through imaginative outreach. The artist then appends those imaginary scenarios to the photos and presents them as possible “histories”. The “morning” in the exhibition title is both a literal dawning—a certain light––but it is also the sunrise of insight, a morning that comes after the long night of doubt.

Encouraging his viewers to bypass predictable storylines and embrace the ambiguity of our lives, Greggory Deddo enables us to encounter afresh the wild open-endedness of life itself. In my view this is a profoundly life-affirming body of artwork—and for that I am grateful. Grateful to have a younger colleague who is looking hard and long at how we orient ourselves in an uncertain world—and bearing witness to a golden thread of faith that all these fragments will one day cohere and form a brilliant tapestry of reality, beauty, and truth in the coming kingdom of God."

Bruce Herman, Gallery Director
Barrington Center for the Arts, Gordon College

Gregory Deddo is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in painting, photography, and video. He graduated with a BA in studio art from Judson University and holds an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. His work explores the nature of images and media as they relate to history, memory, and identity. Deddo has exhibited in group and solo exhibitions across the county. He has also received several grants and scholarships in support of his work and is a Harvey Fellow. Gregory is currently an Assistant Professor of Arts at Gordon College. He lives in South Hamilton with his wife, two sons and daughter.