Fountain Street Gallery is pleased to present Uncultivated, with the work of Sarah Alexander and Jim Banks. The term “uncultivated” often suggests a lack of something, be it in plants or people, as in lacking refinement or manners. It characterizes what doesn’t fit the norm or “grow in rows.” But it fundamentally points to that which is alive and growing, uncontained and unconstrained. In other words, wild. It is this that Alexander and Banks find themselves drawn to—the wild and unpredictable. Their vibrant show, which starts with drawing and branches into painting and sculpture, highlights weeds and other unruly botanicals in novel and unanticipated ways. Follow the rhizomes and you’ll be rewarded with Alexander’s flourish and symbolism and Banks’ precision and vitalism.
Sarah Alexander created a series of drawings that are decorative shrines of longing for people she loves and missed seeing during the pandemic. Passionflowers for her mother, blueberries for her daughter, asters, morning glories, and spiky seed pods are all captured on paper with watercolor, ink and 22k gold leaf. Alexander’s paintings on large canvases barely contain her crowded, tangled, busy, twisting, turning, fantastical gardens. Irrepressible too is her steel sculpture, in which she explores feelings of living in an enchanted limbo, as if turning into one of the wild, overgrown plants in her garden.
Jim Banks has taken thousands of photos of weeds in his pursuit of identifying every one he has seen. These compositions—basically what is in front of your feet—reminded him of the relatively flat, all-over approach of mid-20th century American painting, and seemed a novel approach to landscape. By attending to increasingly more detail in his paintings, he strives to find the “soul” of a patch of ground as it reveals aspects of itself that one could not have anticipated. Banks’ sculptures are 3D drawings using rope and yarn with objects suspended, caught or trapped within them. Tangles, patterns and lines are drawn in space in a seemingly haphazard, “uncultivated” fashion, yet with regard to the details of the knots and other means of connection.
Featured in the Fountain Street Annex are the works of artists Bill Cohn, Alison Judd, and Joan Ryan. They use inspiration from everyday life as their language to create expressions that range from the concrete to the abstract. While sharing a common starting point they illustrate concepts with a diversity of meanings; an exploration of contemporary society, an emphasis on the beauty of the textures of everyday items, and the relationships between mind and memory.
Both exhibitions are through October 24th, 2021.
For more information on the artists and gallery please visit – www.fsfaboston.com.
