Paintings by Lex Braes and Kit White, with Site-Specific Sculpture Installation by Jongil Ma
Hammond Museum and Japanese Stroll Garden
MARGINS: Paintings by Lex Braes and Kit White, with Site-Specific Sculpture Installation by Jongil Ma, brings together three artists with a focus on making art that connects to deeply personal spiritual language. Each one investigates the natural effects of time on spiritual connections, whether with people or with place, and how those connections often get expressed in the peripheral vision, or on the margins, along the edges of our relationships, in nature, and in life. Works in the exhibition reflect the lives of artists, working and creating outside the mainstream, yet connecting with universal truths that we can all recognize.
Engaged in acts of memory and retelling, embracing both oral traditions and written histories, each of these artists employs personal language to define a clear interpretation of our common humanity. Titles for their works, at times achingly sad, and at times humorous, reveal their varied approaches: Mourning Motif, and What You Mean What You Mean What You Mean? and Constant engage our imagination.
Painter Lex Braes and Japanese dancer Mariko Endo will also offer a Butoh dance performance with simultaneous painting, and an original musical score, on the closing date of the exhibition, sponsored by CRS (Center for Remembering & Sharing).
In addition to the exhibition in Guild Hall, the outdoor sculpture installation by Jongil Ma, The Dream in Your Dream The Sweet Sweet Dream, will remain on view at The Hammond Museum and Japanese Stroll Garden for the 2019 season. The sculpture is on view throughout the public visiting hours for the garden. Jongil Ma responds directly to the garden’s large conifer trees, in the section of the garden dedicated to Ancestors, where some of the specimen trees were first planted. The Hammond Museum is pleased to show this newly created site-specific work for the first time in the United States.