SPRING 2009
“Seduced, Built, Imagined” is a series of three back-to-back exhibitions, each with a unique perspective, examining work of contemporary artists, art created by practicing architects, and art created by children. The goal of this series of exhibitions is to open a dialog that helps our community consider the relationship between nature and culture; it asks what is required of us in order to create a new balance, while exploring issues of responsibility as tomorrow becomes today. The exhibitions constitute a journey acknowledging the plea of the experts that change is required, while knowing the only real change happens first within the individual.

“Seduced”
Artists in this exhibition are attuned to the arts’ historical legacy of using landscapes to relate new ideas about exploration, land use politics, and the relativity of aesthetic beauty. Their work responds to our conflicted landscape with a mix of humor, irony, amazement, and terror. Some of the artists seduce the viewer through work that is immensely beautiful, romantic, or that reaches inside to stir compassion only to reveal appalling environmental conditions. Others choose inventive forms or perspectives that immediately engage and slowly reveal.

“Built”
This exhibition brings us home and asks for art to be made locally, in part to remind us that the environment is also here, among us. This exhibition is concerned with the photographic response to the environment by architects, many of whom, both famous and not so famous, reside in our community. They have created workable structures placed on the land affecting the ways we live our lives. Architects are intimately connected to the land. They have purposefully, knowledgeably, and knowingly altered it. As perpetrators of change, what is it that they see when asked to comment in art?

“Imagined”
Oren Lyons’ advice to us concerning the environment is to choose the path of life for the future of our children. And so we will, through an open call with a promise to exhibit all art that comes to us, by asking the children of our local communities to show us what their world will look like when they are fifty. We will welcome interpretations that include aspects of the life they know well: their home, parents, siblings, friends, transportation, attire, conflict, pets, food, learning and studying, sports, and Long Island Sound. A mix of two-dimensional, three-dimensional, and new graphic forms will be encouraged.