Family Tree
Family Tree at the Erie Art Museum
Opening Reception: May 24 6PM
Elegies to the Underground Series at Dowd Gallery, SUNY Cortland
elin o’Hara, Madeleine, Sarah and Susanne Slavick
USA Tour:
Sordoni Art Gallery, Wilkes University, Wilkes-Barre, PA
April 22-June 1, 2025
Martin Art Gallery, Muhlenberg College, Allentown, PA
January-March 2025
Erie Art Museum, Nichols Gallery, Erie PA
May 18-October 18, 2023
Dowd Gallery, SUNY Cortland, Cortland NY
October 24-December 2, 2022
10 min videos by the four artists
Maine Art Journal article about project
Dowd Gallery Exhibition Gallery Info
Programmed Events at Dowd Gallery scroll down here
Family Tree Whakapapa premiered at the Aratoi Wairarapa Museum of Art and History, Masterton, New Zealand, December 12 2020-February 14, 2021. The exhibit then traveled to the Wallace Arts Center, Auckland, New Zealand, April 21-June 13, 2021.
Family Tree Whakapapa Catalogue Cover
A full-colour publication accompanied the exhibition, with an essay by Katherine Guiness and a poem by Rawiri Smith.
Exhibition press release for Family Tree at Wallace Arts Center, Pat Homestead Photoforum NZ online
The term Whakapapa is a Maori term that refers to knowing who you are and where you are from, placing yourself in a wider context with links to land and community.
Luminous Elsewheres
Luminous Elsewheres at Westbeth Gallery
March 31-April 28, 2023
Westbeth Gallery, 55 Bethune St, NYC
March 31-April 28, 2023
Wednesday through Sunday, 1-6pm (And by appointment)
Opening reception: Friday March 31, 6-8pm
Closing reception: Friday, April 28, 6-8pm
My piece in the exhibit- Pulse, 2018, oil on wood, 20” X 16”
This exhibit features artists who actively explore visual domains that are evocative, mysterious and unexpected. Eschewing the confines of logic and linearity, Luminous Elsewheres artists are receptors through whom “the echoes and reflections of an irrational elsewhere flow freely and take form.” (Daniela Ferretti)
“Each artist in Luminous Elsewheres has honed a vision of a personal ‘elsewhere’ that embodies its own radiant dimensionality,” the curators have written. “These visual explorations open up new ways of seeing, feeling and perceiving.” Sourced primarily through intuition and the process of art making itself, the works included in this show bring viewers closer to what Susan Sontag described as “the luminousness of the thing in itself.”
At a time when the collective sense of the world is being disrupted, realigned and reinvented, this approach explores a more allocentric and inclusive way of seeing and feeling. Visual art contributes to constructing a better and more sustainable future, an idea captured in the words of Luminous Elsewheres artist Taney Roniger: “Here we come to the otherness within art itself: that rare kind of art that, defying ready comprehension or systematic interpretation, instead plunges the viewer into the ocean of unknowing.” That ocean of unknowing becomes the place to discover the next story, a better story.
The following artists will be featured in Luminous Elsewheres: Phoebe Adams, Tracey Adams, Cheryl Aden, Deborah Barlow, Hedwig Brouckaert, Janine Brown, Leigh Anne Chambers, Mi-Jin Chun, John Cox, Alison Cuomo, Patrician Dahlman, Silvia De Marchi, Tina Feingold, Karen Fitzgerald, Kathryn Geismar, Caroline Golden, Ed Grant, Laura Gurton, Lynette Haggard, Carole Kunstadt, M P Landis, Joanne Lefrak, Denise Manseau, Donnelly Marks, Elizabeth McAlpin, Diane McGregor, Elizabeth Mead, Elizabeth Mooney, Kellin Nelson, Paula Overbay, Heather Palecek, Sky Pape, Deborah Peeples, Laura Ann Perry, Mary Pinto, Taney Roniger, Larry Rushing, Ann Sgarlata,Julie Shapiro, Sarah Slavick, Rhonda Smith, Malu Tan, Linda Tharp, Priya Vadhyar, Debra Weisberg.
Luminous Elsewheres is curated by Deborah Barlow, Alison Cuomo and Karen Fitzgerald. Representing three international artist collectives--Pell Lucy, Fluid Media and Spliced Connector, respectively—the curators have selected work from members of these groups as well as other aligned artists. “We all share an interest in the many ways artists create extraordinary ‘elsewheres’: trusting the process, learning from materials, relying on intuition, giving voice to the innate intelligence of form,” the curators stated.
For exhibit updates and events:
Luminous Elsewheres show guide
Press contact: Deborah Barlow dbarlow@gmail.com @deborahbarlow
Pell Lucy:: In Praise of Form
Pell Lucy: In Praise of Form
Piano Craft Gallery, 793 Tremont Street, Boston MA
April 1 -24 2022
A catalogue accompanied the exhibition.
P E L L L U C Y :: I N P R A I S E O F F O R M
My catalogue page
Exhibition catalogue essay:
Over the last several decades, formalism in the visual arts has largely been considered a critical embarrassment, one more relic of a bygone era felled by misbegotten ideals. Indeed, since the rise of postmodernism in the latter half of the last century, art has become ever more discursive, prioritizing issues and ideas over the forms in which they are instantiated, often relegating the latter to the status of incidental. But with the larger cultural search for more ecologically aware ways of being, many artists are returning to form, not in the name of a new art world ism but as a means of reclaiming our continuity with nature.
Pell Lucy is a collective of just such artists. Established in 2019 under the leadership of Deborah Barlow, the group coalesced around a set of shared values, all rooted in the emerging ecological ethos. Rejecting the preoccupation with the self that has been our modern Western inheritance, Pell Lucy’s orientation is decidedly outward: away from the human subject formerly at the center of the world and toward the larger world beyond us from which we have become estranged. And for these artists it is form – sensually embodied, discursively silent form – that most powerfully conducts us in this direction. It is the language of the sensual, after all, that we share with other creatures – or, in the Native American locution, with All Our Relations.
Departing from the rigid binaries of the formal- ism of old, Pell Lucy’s pivotal belief is that form, like the body, possesses an intelligence of its own – one far more capacious than conscious, discursive thought. No longer opposed to content but a kind ofcontent of its own, form is here honored as our originary language.
Addressing itself directly to the body, form accesses the deeper regions of our bodymind that house our biological inheritance, both as animals born of the earth and as matter born of the cosmos. And because it embodies the same forces that animate all matter – its rhythms and patterns, its tensions and vibrations – form acts on these deeper levels as an agent of re-membering: bringing back into union that which has been wrest apart. Through attentive engagement with form, these artists believe, we can re-awaken to ourselves as creatures and thus recover a felt participation in the vitality of the world.
Following from the move away from human centrism is Pell Lucy’s embrace of unknowing, of mystery. In a culture that prizes certainty and mastery, much recent art has become intent on delivering messages (and with increasing stringency, those of a political nature). But for Pell Lucy, ambiguity is art’s strongest suit; serving as a kind of gateway to wonder, not- knowing can be a potent means by which those willing to make the self-surrender can profoundly experience a re-enchantment of the world. Offering sensually alluring objects that defy comprehension, these artists draw the viewer into a wilderness of otherness – but one that, while alien to the thinking mind, resonates deeply with the knowing body.
Although it eschews explicit messages or any didactic agenda, Pell Lucy’s vision is nonetheless deeply political. Indeed, withits radical embrace of form as an agent of re-membering, the group embodies a plea for unification on every level. For in reminding us of our shared inheritance with all of earth and cosmos, sensual form necessarily awakens us to our commonality with our fellow humans.
Returning us to our carnal senses and then drawing us outward, form can thus be a source of great renewal and reconnection.
While its sights are set firmly on the larger world, Pell Lucy’s ultimate challenge is to art itself. Will it continue to hold human reason as its highest value and thus remain mired in a moribund worldview? Or, infused with the spirit of a wisening culture, will it welcome back into its fold all that reason has cast out and thus help lead the way to a more integrated future? For these artists at least, the answer is as clear as the name of their group suggests.
– Taney Roniger
At the opening with flowers from students
The exhibit was reviewed by Kate McQuaid in the Boston Globe, April 14, 2022
Interalia Magazine
Interalia Magazine, Emerging Ideas Section
An online magazine dedicated to the interactions between the arts, sciences and consciousness.
Sarah Slavick: Elegy to the Underground
Excerpt-
In the book, the Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben makes the case that the forest is a social network where trees engage in social behaviors, communicating with one another through a vast network of roots. They are not simply individual entities but part of a much larger, complex system that communicates and responds as an organism. There is a whole ecosystem that lives and thrives at the top, around, and in a tree. Through its whole life and even after it is dead and decaying, a tree supports the life around it. Through sharing resources and working together in complex and infinite pathways, alliances, and kinship networks, trees reach enormousness and increase their chances of survival and ours as well. These new discoveries of the hidden life of trees suggest new metaphors for our survival and how we should act to protect our home and our species. My Elegy to the Underground watercolors and oil paintings are a tribute or memorial to trees whose heartbreaking loss I fear and mourn.
Elegy to the Underground 14, 2020 watercolor/arches paper
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Sarah Slavick is a visual artist, political activist, union leader, and professor in the Fine Arts Department at Lesley University’s College of Art and Design in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Slavick’s work was described in the Boston Globe as “a kind of abstract portrait of the psyche in all its dense, unknowable layers.” While her work is abstract, she references cell biology, accretion of geological formations, botanical structure, and the taxonomy of the natural world. Much of her work is inspired from literature, women’s studies, the sciences, philosophy, and the political arena. Slavick holds an MFA from Pratt Institute and a BA from Wesleyan University.
A member of a large family, she has five siblings, three of whom are also professional artists. The current exhibition, Family Tree Whakapapa, brings together the work of four sisters to ‘talk about trees.’ As curators, painters, photographers and writers, we portray trees in conditions in and outside of human care and conflict. In December 2020, the exhibit opened at the Aratoi Museum of Art and History in Masterton, New Zealand, followed at the Wallace Arts Trust Pah Homestead in Auckland and will be exhibited at the Erie Art Museum, Erie, PA USA in January 2023.