Hera Gallery Presents: Collective Worlds
Artists have the ability to conceive entire universes, constructed around personal or political beliefs, local or global concerns, or feelings of despair or hope. They may be expansive and vast, or intimate and circumspect, populated by few or shared by many. While assembling these diverse realms, artists ask: In what ways can we communicate our ideas? Are those ideas optimistic or cynical? Should we utilize an interior perspective or an
exterior existence? Do we draw on media and popular culture, ritual and faith, fantasy or actuality? This creative impulse is an essential part of human existence. It allows us to assign a visual voice to a moment that has happened or has yet to happen. By employing these domains we discover how our internal acuity can lead beyond personal transformation to an interconnection of systems collectively greater than our own. Collective Worlds asks artists to present the alternate realities in which they are a part of, shape, or envision.
About the Juror: Meghan Clare Considine is a Western Massachusetts-based art historian and curator specializing in modern and contemporary visual art and performance and their relationships to radical politics, protest, and global solidarity. She is currently the 2021-2023 Graduate Curatorial Fellow at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA. She has previously held positions at the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum and the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art. In June, she will receive her master’s degree from the Williams College and Clark Art Institute Graduate Program in the History of Art.
Juror Statement: It was an honor to jury Hera Gallery’s “Collective Worlds,” exhibition, and to witness how contemporary artists are engaging themes of communion, collectivity, and imagination– such urgent ideas for a moment of planetary crisis.
In Nomi Stone’s poem “On World-Making,” she begins, quoting Judith Butler:
To love is to tell the story of the world. There was
an ocean with a boat mountains a meadow too painful to stare
at directly. Haven’t I been here before? Yes. No: not quite here.
“It is not as if,” the philosopher writes, “an I exists
independently over here and then simply loses a you over there.”...
As in the poem, the artists in the exhibition latch onto indelible images to imagine relationships at the interpersonal and interspecies level. For these artists, love operates as an analytic to illustrate interconnections between the self and others. Some critique greed and nationalisms that tear people apart, while others use materials like sand and nests that demonstrate intimate relationships, beyond exploitation, between humans and the earth. Some offer scenes of fragile precarity, while others demonstrate the strength and resilience to be found in community. Together, the artists in Collective Worlds demonstrate that whatever our path may be, we cannot go at it alone. Thank you to all of the submitters. It was such a pleasure to spend time with this excellent work.
Featuring Artists: John Affolter, Jenna Alderiso, Catherine Armistead, Gregory Bahr, Dustin Brinkman, Amy Broderick, Cassandra.Chalfant, Andrea Cullins, Noreen Dean Dresser, Scott Fisk, Arlet Gomez, Nicole Maloof, Dan McCormack, Cheryl Mincone, Susan Nowogrodzki, Hillel O’Leary, Boryana Rusenova-Ina, Tom Speaker, Hayden Stern, Stephanie Todhunter, and Roger Walkup.