Opening Reception

Alison Gates’ textiles and Colin Matthes drawings apply humor and wit to subjects as serious as survival skills and global warming in paired solo exhibitions "Points of Departure" and "The Days Go By Like Wildness" open April 28 through July 23 at the James Watrous Gallery. 

Alison Gates works primarily in textiles and mixed media, using knitting and embroidery to explore issues of gender, climate change, and the way language, cultural traditions, and our experience of place shift over time and in different contexts. Adding subtly embroidered words to printed textiles, she creates a quiet disturbance, a whisper of new meaning that shifts the pattern in unexpected directions. Gates' recent woven paper maps create a similar shift in perspective, folding disparate geographies into new relationships that suggest the changeable nature of official borders.

This exhibition will also include her Global Warming series of wool bikinis, hand-knitted using traditional patterns from northern Europe. These beautifully made bikinis use humor to raise a serious question. As the climate warms, what will happen to these knitting traditions, which are such important markers of cultural identity? Will they disappear like other traditions and skills that no longer suit the local climate, or evolve to suit the changing conditions? 

Colin Matthes’ art is rooted in improvisation and resourcefulness. As a young man growing up in a remote, rural area, Matthes learned to work with whatever was at hand. In 2011 he was living on Ireland’s desolate west coast, and began cataloguing the skills and information he’d need to survive without outside help. This inspired Matthes’ ongoing series of “Essential Knowledge” drawings, which cover everything from surviving shark and grizzly attacks or escaping a riptide to reading body language and the safe way to move a heavy object. More recently he has been drawing without an agenda, using the quiet hours after his children’s bedtime to let his pencil or brush roam freely with his imagination. With this unfettered approach, Matthes finds that (in his young daughter’s words) “the days go by like wildness.”