The Salon Show

Featuring
Elisa Adams has the strong and careful touch of a chiropractor and sculptor. In her hands the
rigid material of stone comes to life and forms fluid shapes that dance with energy. Adams
began working with stone just over a decade ago, and has spent those years forming a
connection between her fingertips and the stone, challenging its limits and harnessing its
strengths. Adams draws inspiration from natural elements. Her pieces drift between the
boundaries of hard and soft, organic and inanimate.

Adria Arch creates bright, gestural paintings which engage the element of chance through
liquid movements of paint. The combination of solid, opaque shapes and more fluid patterns
create depth, while bursts of color bring unique energy to each piece. These large scale works
uses both graphic and painterly elements in playful abstract compositions that embrace
spontaneity.

Keenan Derby highly textured paintings are in perpetual motion. Working in acrylic, oil, and
sand, Derby’s technique lifts the paint off each piece’s surface as he negotiates intention and
material, embracing the unpredictable physicality of paint. Cosmic cycles, objects in motion,
tidal patterns, and ancient overgrown temples and tombs all provide inspiration for the raw
energy captured in his work.

Nina Dine is a New York City-based painter and printmaker who works primarily in series,
each piece representing a part of herself, connected through explorations of communication
and relationships. Her muse is a frequent subject, rendered with varying techniques, providing
an emotional anchor between herself and her work through the chemistry they share.
Benjamin Flythe is a Boston-based designer and photographer, whose work turns the
camera on the dark corners of humanity, staging voyeuristic scenes which are simultaneously
raw and fantastical, cold and erotic. Making Classical and Biblical references, Flythe opens
these intimate moments into a larger context, exploring how the same stories are retold,
twisted and transformed through a contemporary lens.

Lisa A. Foster combines painting and textiles into two-dimensional works that explore the
lives of women through the configuration of their bodies. She uses the lines of the human
figure to create unexpected shapes within and between her subjects. Her use of quilt fabrics as
something that is solidly built and two-dimensional inverts the typical applications of textile,
transforming something decorative into a striking fine art medium.

William Vaughn Griffin is a Boston-based photographer who takes pleasure in geometry
and form, and is inspired by explorations of the city he lives in. As a Foot Messenger in Boston,
Griffin travels the city seeking new perspectives and unique interactions, capturing these
chance meetings in his photographs. His work acts as a catalyst for the viewer’s imagination,
illuminating an unexpected moment to raise questions and curiosities about the environments
we live in.

Holly Harrison is a mixed media artist whose collages use a variety of techniques to explore
the interplay between organic and geometric. She uses diverse materials including painting,
photography, paper ephemera, fiberglass screen, her daughter’s drawings and handwritten
samples, and pieces of her husband’s discarded paintings, which she weaves together in a slow
build up of layers. Present in all her work is the juxtaposition of natural and manmade, and the
repetition of the horizon line.

Nicole Patel is a New York-based artist whose work is at once minimal and nuanced. Her
geometric grids explore elements of drawing and design through textile. Patel works with only
organic, sustainable medium. She sees the full potential of raw materials, without the
irreversible alterations of cutting, coloring, and marking. Made from one or two threads wound
across a blank surface, her pieces can all be disassembled and reassembled limitlessly.

Julia S. Powell’s oil paintings, teeming with lively brushstrokes and mottled with vibrant
color, depict scenes that can’t be found anywhere on Earth, but carry the essence of the natural
world within them. By contemporizing landscape painting, Powell brings the subject of nature
into modern appreciation, creating a connection between the viewer and nature that can’t be
accessed through any other perspective.
Jenny Swanson’s ceramic sculptures twist and reach into organic shapes. Each vessel
encloses a mysterious interior, while the curving forms of the exterior allude to silhouettes
found in body and nature. Drawing inspiration from the aberrations and asymmetry of
wilderness, Swanson questions perceptions of beauty with the unique architecture of her
sculpture.

Caron Tabb’s abstract paintings are fluid and expressive, with bold marks created using
various techniques and materials. She captures movement, time, and above all, the mental and
emotional state of the artist at that specific time—something that she will never experience in
quite the same way again. This is the part of the magnetism of her work: it draws something
out of its audience that is familiar, and yet impossible to experience again in any other context.

Mark Tortorella is a self-taught Boston-based painter who employs the traditional
technique of tromp-l’oeil to create unexpected narrative twists. His work is technically
proficient, with an element of dark humor and irony, creating a fresh conversation around his
intensely realistic paintings.

Katie Wild’s striking, cinematic paintings transform the tradition of figure and portraiture to
achieve a contemporary understanding of the human condition. In her most recent
series, Steampunk, Wild references photographs she took of real people at a steampunk
festival. It explores the nature of chance encounters, and the impressions they leave. Her
multimedia approach embraces the superficial adornments we use to present ourselves. The
paintings are rendered on metallic surfaces, and incorporate objects such as cogs and clocks
which are essential to the steampunk aesthetic.

Natalia Wróbel is a Polish-American artist working in Cambridge, MA. Her abstract work is
inspired by mindfulness and the gravity underlying simple, everyday moments, and the
interconnectedness of all things. The concept of Wróbel’s current series, Hidden Histories,
sources the histories of resistance, and illuminates the simultaneous fragility and strength of the
spirit. Each piece is created through an archaeological process, unearthing the finished piece
through building up and excavating layers as she paints. Her colors and lines reference natural
elements of roots, moss, and metal, and her energetic mark-making vibrates with contrasting
elements: softness and lines, luminance and shadows, merging and expanding.