Starting a new year - 2021

As we start this new year, I suspect we are all full of expectations for 2021. Full of hopes for our friends and family, of resolutions to help make this a better, more just, world, but also maybe a little bit tired of hiding behind a mask!

Given that the political and Covid-19 pandemics are not exactly over, this new year will need our collective vision and hard work to bring it forward. We cannot come out of a global pandemic and economic shut-down without thinking that hard work is ahead of us, for all of us. The virus has shown us how intricately involved our (political, environmental, social, and economical) lives are here and across the globe. We will need to rebuild community networks—they are the basis for trust across boundaries, as well as, economic integration. This will not happen by chance or by luck, but by plowing ahead with grit and heart. It will be a year full of resolution, compassion, and endurance.

To this end, the Gallery plans for art and environment exhibitions with associated workshops (via Zoom) are underway and the co-location of local-brewery Kraemer & Kin (with great food) at GreenTARA will continue.

I send heartfelt thanks to all of you and much joy as we begin to care for all sentient beings, as well as ourselves, in this new year.

Mandala by Melissa Forbes - please check for future workshops. http://www.forbesyantra.com

Giving thanks, November.

I love November — it is a time of early dark, wild sunsets, twinkly lights, and sitting by the fire… it is a time of quieting down the busy harvest spirit and yet not quite the dream time of deep winter.

Going forward please be aware of two things: 1) due to rise in Covid-19 illness numbers, Kraemer & Kin are no longer serving locally-crafted brews, but they are still open for retails sales, and 2) Migrations Sarah Ashe’s work in mixed-media and acrylic comes down in another week, i.e., Sunday Nov 22 is the last day to visit her work. Hours per K &K : F, S, S 12 - 6pm.

Our changing season: November's here!

October full moon and Halloween lead to November snows, but this year the Gallery is still OPEN… with Kraemer & Kin hosting. Such a pleasure to know that in uncertain times (Covid-19, national elections, hurricanes, closed-down borders…) community connections can still be vibrant. And Sarah Ashe’s work Migrations is in the Gallery thru Sunday Nov 22 — such a special voice. Best to everyone, miss you!

Migrations - current show

Migrations

Earth not so much migrates around the sun as she rotates in a given trajectory, and with this transit through the skies, we gain a broader view of our universe.

I believe the notion of migration is deeply embedded in us.  In looking to Geology, we find the massive shifting of continental plates millions of years ago forming Earth as we know her today.  So I ask: Is this not a shape-shifting migration of Earth’s crust?

History tells us of many migrations, across time and place, starting with the exodus from the Great African Rift Valley through numerous and subsequent migrations—both human and animal—forming the populations we are and the others we depend on.

Migrations occur at differing scales and for varying reasons.  For example, we are comfortable with the migrating birds through our landscape; the Sami and the Nenet depend on caribou migrations for their livelihood; and the fishing industry follows the movement of species in the oceans, but when it comes to the movement of people through our territory we get defensive and, even go so far as constructing physical and legal walls—castle walls, the Berlin Wall, the Great Wall of China, US immigration policies, and more.

Human history is fraught with population growth and movement, expansion and contraction of resources, political exoduses, and economic migrations. We know these causes and impacts—the socio-political ravages and violence of war such as caused the recent exodus of Syrian refugees or the Ruhingas pushed out of Myanmar and into Bangladesh; the environmental catastrophes of volcanic activity, drought, forest fires, flooding, tsunamis, and hurricanes which caused the displacement of hundreds of poor from their shorelands due to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami or the ongoing drought and flooding in south Sudan affecting millions; and of course, the global economic forces of the neo-liberal policies such as the US promulgated “shock doctrine” in South and Central America whose outcome is now being felt on the USA/Mexico border.

We can study these things, calculate and measure them, but to feel the turmoil, fear, anger, pain, suffering, and see the deaths that ensue in each case is heart-breaking.   This is where Sarah Ashe’s work brings us.  Her paintings and sculptures move us from the UN reports and news accounts to the visual and tactile. 

The paintings are visceral with colour and emotion while portraying a multitude in motion across a landscape or sea.  The sculptures are small and seemingly fragile like a little bundle of life in a boat at the edge of collapse.  And her experience of living in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina happened is not lost.  Together they harness the light in the Gallery to transform our imagination and awaken our awareness of being alive.

Migrations: Hanging the show with artist Sarah Ashe

The Gallery at GreenTARA Space is happy to host Sarah Ashe’s paintings and sculptures on Migrations. Her art exhibit runs Friday Oct 16 thru Sunday November 22, 2020.

The overall Gallery theme for the fall is EarthFirst and the Migrations show continues our recognition of the power of the Universe and our life in it. We have become a transformative force—however way you want to look at it. In this case, the migration of humans across the globe continues the centuries old drama—one that engages empathy, fear, pain, torment, and joy.

Sarah Ashe: So much of migration today involves enormous risk, courage and desperation… to move with the seasons as part of life’s rhythm is one form… but to have to leave is sadly a reality of our times. It’s the latter that my work focuses on.

GreenTARA Space is now both art exhibit space and local tasting room for Kraemer & Kin island brewery. Hours to visit the art or craft brews are F, S, S noon to 6pm. For more information about art please visit us online or contact GreenTARA Gallery. For Kraemer & Kin local brewery and community activities, please contact them at beer@kraemerandkin.com.

How the Earth Was Made

I found that this 10-part series about EARTH speaks to our Champlain overthrusts, questions about erosion along our lakeshores, the stromatopods of Isle Lamotte, and so many more aspects that surround us in our little corner of Earth. Check it out!

Thomas Berry interview by Caroline Webb of Caduceus Magazine

There are so many reason to think of Earth first in this time we are living in, and in so many ways trying to live around and despite. But the Thomas Berry interview from 2002 (embedded below) is a timely gift as it encapsulates much of my intent behind the current GreenTARA Gallery theme EarthFirst. We cannot possibly solve, or as others would say, heal without considering all life. We are not solo players despite our modernist upbringing and mechanistic systems thinking.

While art is both a primordial and a final act, it is dis-valued and made external to ”what matters”. Yet it is thru art that we reach out beyond our own selves and try to touch the Universe. When we breach the space, It is not necessarily the materiality of art that counts, but its transcendence. Art can be beautiful, fearsome, provocative, dangerous — but the ongoing struggle is how to share that emergent connection and bring it into the world.

In this way, the Gallery show moves from the Living Place : Ecological Design Panels which were a result of the 2014 Burlington design competition to Migrations by Sarah Ashe. The connection between the two shows is of course how we live on Earth, from how we think and design for water, food, people , to what we understand about human migrations and peoples desperate search for healthier lives.

To think that we can have a viable human economy

by destroying the Earth economy is absurd

Indigenous people still live in a universe,

but we don’t; we live in an economic system

“Caroline Webb:
As Caduceus is a magazine concerned with healing, transformation and wholeness, I’d like to start with asking how you approach the question of healing – whether for an individual, a community or the planet. What do you see as its essence?

Thomas Berry:
Healing presupposes the integral unity of things. What is the context of healing? Human health is a subsystem of the Earth’s health. You cannot have well humans on a sick planet.

The ecology issue emerges out of the fact that humans have been constructing a government for humans, by humans and with its destiny in developing the human – but that won’t work because if the human is looking for its own benefit rather than the benefit of the larger community, if we become predators on the natural community, then we lose in every way.”

EarthFirst

The new show : EarthFirst is a series of different exhibitions over the course of the fall.  Just installed in the Gallery are design panels from a 2014 competition on Ecological Design — Living Place. The concept behind EarthFirst is to weave together a thought process about Earth, and that place where we find ourselves…. Other artists (such as Sarah Ashe and her Migrations pieces) and their art will follow. The ensō image is here to symbolize the universal void that we find ourselves in, the strength and elegance we need, and the forming and un-forming of Earth as we breathe.

““A Prayer Among Friends” from Of EARTH by John Daniel :
”Among other wonders of our lives, we are alive with one another, we walk here in the light of this unlikely world that isn’t ours for long. May we spend generously the time we are given. May we enact our responsibilities as thoroughly as we enjoy our pleasures. May we see with clarity, may we honor the mystery surpassing our sight, and may we hold in our hands the gift of good work and bear it forth whole, as we were borne forth by a power we praise to this one Earth, this homeland of all we love.””