Opening Reception:
Thursday, September 12, 5-8pm
Artist Talk:
Thursday, September 26, 6:30-7:30pm
Simmons University presents Signal to Signal featuring new & site specific work by Crystalle Lacouture. This exhibition is on view from Monday, September 9, 2024 to Friday, October 18, 2024 with an opening reception on Thursday, September 12 from 5-8 pm and an artist talk on Thursday, September 26 from 6:30-7:30 pm.
In Signal to Signal, a special focus is placed on artworks that play with embedded systems of code. Paintings, MAMA drawings, a site-specific House Jewelry installation and a large new deconstructed maritime signal flag work all contain layers of meaning and hidden messages.
Lacouture utilizes a dynamic vocabulary of colors and shapes and layers her geometric compositions with coded messages of protection. In her MAMA drawings, she paints and draws on Score Keeper shooting targets using her visual lexicon to transform these objects associated with violence into colorful mandalas and shield-like charms. She re-harnesses their power and directs it towards memorializing and healing.
A site-specific House Jewelry installation made of touchable strands of soft wooden beads and metal bells proposes that spaces, like humans, deserve adornments and charms. In some strands, the colored beads and bells become 1s and 0s creating binary coded messages of protection like “Safe Haven,” “Bless this House,” and “Protect this Home.” Visitors are invited to interact with these necklaces to activate the various sounds made by the different bells and beads.
The exhibition’s namesake, Signal to Signal, deconstructs the graphic compositions of nautical signal flags. Cut up and rearranged, these stretched fragments reference the 30-year correspondence between poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, two natives of Massachusetts. Overlaid on the surface of the flags are two additional coded missives – a star chart of the prominent constellation Ursa Major and a line in Baudot code from an elegy for Lowell written by Bishop: ” Afloat in mystic blue…” The stars, represented by bells of varying sizes and the coded line of poetry in blue on blue grant new meaning to the dismantled and reconstructed flags.
Crystalle Lacouture is a Wellesley-based artist who works across the media of painting, printmaking, conceptual practices, and installation to investigate the notion that the artist has a unique role as a helper, memorializer, time-keeper, and talisman-maker. She received her BFA in Painting/Printmaking from Skidmore College and has exhibited widely throughout New England, New York and beyond. In addition to her full-time studio practice, she is a curator at Tourtists, a hotel in North Adams, MA and is one of the organizers behind Arrival Art Fair.
Trustman Art Gallery hours are 10 AM – 4:30 PM, Monday, Tuesday, Friday, and 10 AM – 7 PM on Wednesday and Thursday. The Gallery is free, open to the public and wheelchair accessible.
The Trustman Art Gallery is located within Simmons University at 300 Fenway, 4th floor, Boston MA 02115. For more information, contact Helen Popinchalk at [email protected].
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