Gallery A3 Reopens July 1

Source: Gallery A3

Gallery A3 will reopen on July 1 after a year of showing artwork in window displays only, due to the pandemic.  Gallery A3 resumes its schedule of monthly one- and two-person shows. Inward & Outward (see below), works by Janet W. Winston and Laura Holland, will be on display in July; work by GK Khalsa and Tom Morton will be featured in August. The gallery is located at 28 Amity Street 1 D.

To ensure health and safety, the gallery has upgraded the ventilation system, and asks visitors to wear masks inside the gallery.  Capacity will be limited to four visitors at a time and refreshments will not be served at openings until conditions permit. For the present, gallery hours will be 3 p.m.-7:00 p.m. Thursday – Sunday. Updated information will be posted on the gallery website, www.gallerya3.com.

Monthly Artist Forums online, on the third Thursday of every month at 7:30 p.m. will continue.  The Artist Forums are free and open to the public, with pre-registration required (see website). Gallery A3 is grateful for support from the Amherst Cultural Council, a local agency, which is supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency. 

Current Exhibit: INWARD & OUTWARD

Hand-made Books by Laura Holland; Prints & Paintings by Janet W. Winston 

In INWARD & OUTWARD, at Gallery A3 in July, Laura Holland turns inward, to discover still lives amidst domestic clutter in a series of hand-made accordion books, while Janet W. Winston looks outward—up and down and across the horizon—to interpret beauty in the land and in constantly changing colors, weather, and movement in oil paintings and monotype prints.

Holland found that the coronavirus, and particularly the lockdown, shifted the focus and scale of her artwork. “As my home became my world, I discovered small-scale, intimate still lives in eggshells on the counter, carrot peels in the sink, and pans of soapy water. And as the lockdown stretched on, my photographs of these little still lives became increasingly more abstract. I strung images together in a 16-panel accordion book, Stay-at-Home Still Lives, which grew to twice the length of large-scale pieces I made before. The zig zag structure, stretching over 10 feet long, was unwieldy and close to unmanageable—which mirrored the tension and confusion I felt in dealing with a global pandemic. At the same time, with small-scale accordion books like Typewriter and Stringed Instrument, I peered deeper inside domestic objects and pushed images further toward abstraction, cutting and folding large photographs and reassembling them in the new context of consecutive panels.”

Turning her gaze up to the sky and down into the earth, Winston makes monotypes and large paintings based on water holes in the Yucatan, views along the Connecticut River, and the sheer canyon walls and distant thunder clouds in the Southwest of the United States. “The importance of the sun and stars in the Mayan culture and cosmology influenced some of my monotypes. The Yucatan geology of porous limestone earth, which has beautiful, clear aqua water-filled sinkholes, piqued my interest for the paintings Cenote 1 and Cenote 2,” she explains. Light, shadow, shifting colors, and the beauty in unusual geography are major inspirations for her art. “From an intimate miniature scale to the far view of magnificent mountains, Nature can swell my heart,” Winston says. “I combine organic shapes from nature with geometric lines from architecture, using loose brushstrokes and mark making in my paintings.”

At an Artist Forum Online, on Thursday, July 15, at 7:30 pm, Holland and Winston will talk about their work and invite conversation and questions. The event is free and open to the public, with pre-registration at www.gallerya3.com . The program is supported in part by a grant from the Amherst Cultural Council, a local agency, which is supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency.