Art Beat: Dancing around the discord at Marion Art Center's Summer Members' Show

With just under a hundred works of art by dozens of artists, engaged in a wide array of disciplines and without a common theme, and tightly packed over both floors of the Marion Art Center, the Summer Members’ Show resonates with a palpable discordance. But that said, there is beauty to be found if one can dance around the discord.

Find a dance partner. Or two. Or more.

Among the works that caught my eye was Butch McCarthy’s “Feast,” an abstract acyrlic painting with dabs of lavender, apricot, ecru, black and white. For those long familiar with his work, that started with traditional landscapes, portraits and still lifes, and occasionally tapped a pop art sensibility (the iconic Lobster Pot restaurant in Provincetown or an oversized bottle Tabasco Sauce, for example), this seems like a natural progression.

His work has slowly been shifting to a reductive approach, such as a few orange triangles against two rectangles of variant blues that still read as three sailboats on the harbor. “Feast” seems to fully embrace the non-objective. Wherever this path takes him, it will be an interesting ride.

“My Backyard,” an oil pastel on canvas by Susan Gilmore, depicts the woods behind her Westport home with an array of vivid colors and compositional elements. She has drawn more than a dozen tree trunks to create a series of up-and-down movements. Those vertical thrusts interact with horizontal bands of colors that acknowledge the soil of the foreground, a flowerbed, grass, bushes, a distant treeline and a pastel blue sky in the deepest background.

Gilmore takes Hans Hoffman’s “push and pull” approach to color relationships and drops it into the heart of a landscape, creating a dynamic picture plane.

Heather Long-Roise displays an acrylic up-close-and-personal portrait of a man in a red baseball cap and matching jacket. He is bearded, bespectacled and seemingly bewildered. He holds up a pair of empty chopsticks in his hand. It’s called “No Sushi for You,” clearly a reference to the famed “Soup Nazi” episode of “Seinfeld.” Long-Roise provides a bit of levity to the proceedings.

There are four works by sculptor John Magnan. One is a two-dimensional wall piece constructed of cut and shaped segments of maple, purpleheart, walnut and cherry and arranged like an intricate jigsaw puzzle. It is called “Killing Commendatore,” and refers to “Don Giovanni,” the opera by Mozart.

In the opera, Giovanni, a serial “seducer” (which is far too kind a word), rapes Donna Anna while disguised as her fiancé. When the victim’s father (the Commendatore) pursues him as he tries to escape, Giovanni kills him with a pistol. Later in the opera, the ghostly Commendatore drags the rapist to Hell.

In Magnan’s handsome construction, a key element is the face of the two men — the killer and the killed — merged as one.

There is a trio of Magnan’s small sculptures displayed together on a pedestal. While they share some cultural and thematic DNA, the three are distinct works.

Carved from maple and purpleheart, “Subjugation” is a shackle reminiscent of the kind that was used in order to transport captured Africans across the Atlantic to be sold into slavery in the Americas.

“Incarceration” is a pair of handcuffs (remarkably carved from a single piece of walnut) that speaks to the present-day injustice of disproportionately high arrest rates and convictions of Black men, a tragedy born of prejudice, hatred and fear.

Lastly, Magnan’s “The Brown Paper Bag Test” (white oak) references colorism, the phenomenon in which Black people who have a lighter skin tone may receive preferential treatment as opposed to those with a bit more melanin.

Magnan, an artisan of the highest order, pulls no punches with his socially-charged work. And that is a very good thing. Some subjects need to be approached with the kid gloves taken off.

A few other works that garnered my attention were Patricia Gray’s “Capitano,” Noelle Keach’s “Spring Equinox” and Michael Pietragalla’s “Tarot Card Slipcase,” borrowed back from a private collection.

But dance with who you want to dance with.

“The Summer Members’ Show” is on display at the Marion Art Center, 80 Pleasant St., Marion, until Sept. 16.

This article originally appeared on The Herald News: Art Beat visits Marion Art Center's Summer 2022 Members Show