The Silvermine Galleries will open two new exhibitions on February 11: the second annual Legacy Exhibition and John Small’s “Structures of Nature.”

The Legacy of Silvermine
As the Silvermine Arts Center heads toward its hundredth year, it is celebrating—in this second annual Legacy Exhibition—the luminaries and Lifetime Guild Members who are in many ways the reason for Silvermine’s vital and enduring presence as an artists’ community with continuing regional and national reach. Many of these artists have work in public spaces and major museums. All of them found at Silvermine a place that embraces new ideas and forms—and a community from which to draw camaraderie, constructive criticism, and inspiration. An opening reception for The Legacy of Silvermine: Artists, Art, and Community will take place on Sun., Feb. 11, from 2-4pm.
A few highlights from this year’s exhibition: Sergio Gonzalez-Tornero was born in Chile. Best known as a printmaker, he describes his work as a synthesis of a compulsion toward modernist form and a fascination with the historic cultures of the Pacific Northwest. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and the New York Public Library. Though she is a master of many materials, sculptor Renata Manasse Schwebel of Pound Ridge, NY, returns again and again to welded metals especially stainless steel and aluminum, to which she brings a joy for the form as well as for the handling of the metal. Ken Davies (1925-2017), the American realist painter, is also known for the wild turkey paintings made for the Austin, Nichols Distilling Company and for his illustration projects for numerous national imprints. His paintings appear in major museums across the country.
Suites of work by these lions of Silvermine will be on view in the Galleries: Donald Axelroad of Stamford; Marilyn Clements of Stamford; Adrienne Cullom of Mahopac, NY; Ken Davies of Madison; Lois Flint Eldridge of South Glastonbury; Leonard Everett Fisher of Westport; Christy Gallagher of Bridgeport; Sergio Gonzalez-Tornero of Mahopac, NY; Lou Hicks of Stamford; Jane Ingram of Ridgefield; Judith Orseck Katz of Westport; Jak Kovatch of Westport; Janet Levine of New York City; Renata Manasse Schwebel of Pound Ridge, NY; and Jody Silver of Stamford.
John Small, Structures of Nature
The artwork of John Small serves as an exploration into the everyday ways that human life affects the environment. A trained field ornithologist and naturalist, Small, who won a Best in Show Award in Silvermine’s Art of the Northeast Exhibition, applies the rich history of natural science as a lens through which to investigate contemporary domestic life. By applying a scientific context to the everyday, he invites us to break down the barrier that exists in our minds between the manmade and the natural world. Rather than waxing poetic on the wonders of natural ecosystem – which he could at length- the artist investigates the mundane spaces of suburban life and how they control and succumb to the rhythms of the natural world. The artist reminds us that a coyote or an alligator wandering into a cul de sac is not a freak accident but the inevitable consequence of nature reasserting itself.
For Small, the bird is a particularly impactful metaphor. An avid amateur ornithologist- he would remind us that their habits are responsible for much of the natural world that we take for granted. Rather than fixtures of our backyard morning coffee, we are reminded that they belong to a different world, with different rules. The works on display reimagine our daily interactions with the 2 x 4, reasserting its material presence as a function of the natural world rather than solely as a resource to be used in the construction of our built environment. The ongoing series of small 10” x 8” paintings explore this archetype.
In the center of the gallery space, a familiar backyard fence blocks the viewer from fully experiencing Small’s latest installation, which recalls a mishmash of the suburban garden space and the wilderness. Both are something that the artist is intimately familiar with having been raised in suburban Manitoba, Canada. Repositioning the picket fence of our childhoods as a barrier invites us to question the human need to contain land and questions what it means to put up a fence. Are we keeping things in or out, what does this do to the world around us and why do we need to build them?
The public is invited to the opening reception on Sunday, February 11, from 2-4 pm. Both the Legacy Exhibition and Structures of Nature run through March 11.