BYFIELD — The Governor’s Academy is excited to feature Undercurrents, an exhibition of the work of four New York and Boston-based artists: Meghan Bailey, Amy Decker, Angelina Ruiz, and Belle Struck. The exhibit will be on display in the gallery in the Remis Lobby of the Wilkie Center for the Performing Arts on The Governor’s Academy campus from now until Friday, Jan. 12.
The artists’ work asks similar questions about displacement, identity, states of being and consciousness, the Anthropocene, migration, alternate narratives, nostalgia, and systems of repair. Working in a variety of mediums, from paper and video, to paint and sculpture, the works aim to map landscapes of meaning through the undercurrent of movement and connection.
Bailey is a Boston-based artist who holds an master’s degree in visual arts from Lesley University, a bachelor’s degree in painting from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and an master’s degree in library science and archives management from Simmons University. She currently works as an archivist at the Healey Library at UMass-Boston. Her work, shown in galleries throughout the northeast, combines traditionally gendered forms of discarded industrial tools and machines with textile patterns, craft, and decorative art. Bailey’s inventive language produces idiosyncratic constructions and gestures that reflect fluid possibilities beyond prescribed utility.
New Jersey native Decker received a bachelor’s degree in graphic design from the School of Visual Arts and holds a master’s degree from Lesley University. Her work has been exhibited at the Art Students League, Knockdown Center, Art Directors Club, and ChaShaMa at Brooklyn Bridge Park, among other venues. She currently lives in Brooklyn and works as a textile designer.
Decker’s language is expressed through combining drawing, painting, and collage. Her work can be seen as maps: abstracted and swirling, indirect yet engaging. The pieces serve as guides to reconnect to the dynamic, shape-shifting life path.
Based in New York City, Ruiz is a Puerto Rican artist who holds an master’s degree in visual arts from Lesley University and a bachelor’s degree in photography from SUNY Purchase College. Born and raised in the Bronx, Ruiz’s work focuses on nostalgia and memory, the story of the Puerto Rican diaspora, and a constant longing for home. Their practice, spanning over t10 years, includes photography, video, and installation. Paths of migration and memory are the focus of Ruiz’s current work. The interactions between images, both still and moving, work to solve a longing for home that many people across diasporic cultures face. The images act as a catalyst to link the spaces where both they and their ancestors resided: Puerto Rico and the Bronx.
Struck holds a bachelor’s degree in printmaking from the Art Institute of Boston and a masters’s degree in visuaL arts from Lesley University and currently teaches visual arts at The Governor’s Academy. Struck produces works on paper as well as wild installations of the Great Salt Marsh of the Quascacunquen River Basin. She has an etching in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, as part of a tribute to printmaker Micheal Mazur. Struck evokes her ancestors through a set of visual spells, weaving natural death processes through the lens of the Anthropocene. Her assembly activates natural systems to imagine alternative forms of embodiment through alchemy and transformation. Like Bailey, Decker, and Ruiz, Struck’s work asks questions of impact, connection, and time.
Please take some time to experience this regional exhibition and join the academy for a reception on Thursday, Jan. 11, from 6 to 7 p.m. The gallery is open to the public from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekdays when school is in session on weekends by appointment (Please contact Shanna Fliegel at [email protected]).
Follow the academy on social media on @govsarts and @govsacademy for updates.