Seasonal Changes

August brings us a bounty of seasonal changes from herbaceous flowers and herbs to harrowing heat. The changes at the Gallery include installation of a heat pump system by Vermont Energy to see if we can cool down the building in these 90+ degree days. I’ve never lived with AC so this is a learning curve and an acknowledgement of how climate change is affecting our habits and investments. Not sure it’s the right solution but here we are.

Of course on a more grounded level the sunflowers, zinnias, bee balm and mounds of herbs are feeding the pollinators. We’ve found many new kinds of caterpillars this year… and the monarchs are now hatching from their chrysalises. Look herbal tea mixes in the fall, but before then we have the TRANSMIGRATION SHOW up thru Sunday August 29 with Jessica Scriver and Mary Admasian.

Transmigration: the passage of cells, populations, and spirit

TRANSMIGRATION : This passage is a condition of change and evolution that we’ve collectively tried to stabilize and control through our engineered constructions and our neo-colonialist/post-industrial economic ways and which works against the natural conditions of movement and migration through cells, populations, and soul. Still, our markings and geographies migrate through life at the cellular, geographic, and spiritual levels of our own becoming.

GreenTARA Gallery is happy to announce this second of the 2021 art shows with Vermont Artists: Jessica Scriver - A New Geography and Mary Admasian - Marked.

The Gallery theme of Transition, Transmigration, Transmission, and Transcendence will permeate the four curated art shows of the year.

Transmigration runs Friday July 9, 2021 thru Sunday August 29, 2021. Gallery is OPEN Fri, Sat, Sun 12noon - 6pm during Kraemer & Kin’s hours of operation.

Please join us for an Art Reception in July.... Date to be announced!

What's ahead...

By the end of May, the Gallery will have a new show up. This will be the first of the 2021 series Transition, Transmigration, Transmission, and Transcendence. The first Gallery show opens May 28 and runs through July 4th and features Susan Smereka's new work Far from Black and White along with Endangered Beauty, fire work, by Sabrina Fadial. Hours for all shows will be during Kraemer & Kin's normal hours of operation (F, S, S 12noon to 6pm; please verify days & times with them) or contact me for private appointments.

Also not to be missed: Susan Smereka is offering an Upcycle Journal Workshop at the Gallery on Sunday, June 6th. Please sign up online or by sending me an email. Details: 10am to 3pm, with 1 hour for lunch on your own. $35, incl. materials. 8 persons max.

new work by Susan Smereka

new work by Susan Smereka

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.

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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.

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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.