Arts, Dining & Entertainment

The Alley Gallery brings Ellen Shattuck Pierce home for solo exhibition

8.11-Ellen Shattuck Pierce reception at Alley Gallery-Good Neighbor-Courtesy Ellen Shattuck Pierce

“Good Neighbor”

“Lights”

“Lights”

“Ice Dam”

“Ice Dam”

Saturday, Aug. 11, 6-8 p.m.—RUTLAND—The opening reception for Ellen Shattuck Pierce’s solo exhibition, “Thirty-six Views of Home,” a collection of prints about motherhood, will be held Saturday, Aug. 11, 6-8 p.m. at The Alley Gallery, Center St., Rutland.

Free wine, light refreshments, and live music will invite art-lovers and print-enthusiasts from all over the northeast to The Alley Gallery on the Saturday night of the summer Art in the Park weekend for an evening with a Rutland-native returned home.

Ellen Shattuck Pierce moved to Boston to pursue her art career after growing up in Rutland. Pierce went to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, graduated from UMass Boston, and received her Ed.M in Arts Education from Harvard. Being part Canadian, Pierce longed to spend time in Canada and moved to Toronto to complete her MFA at York University. She eventually settled in Boston where she teaches art to elementary students in Cambridge and works in her studio. Studio life and the home life she shares with her husband, two teen boys, a dog, and a cat, inform one another in complimentary ways. “This work, like all my work, is about motherhood; it’s a theme I cannot escape,” Pierce says of her current exhibit.

Pierce reflected on her collection. “On good days, my kids and students are charming, my chores meditative, my art a witty reflection of the everyday mundanity and challenge of building humans. On bad days, I am sucked dry and my images are violent. Ice dam stalactites plunge through my dining room ceiling.”

Pierce is overwhelmed by giving and by the want to give in, puncture the good will, slice the maternal feelings and sabotage all she has worked so hard to create. “These opposing identities are in all of us,” she commented, “parents or not.” Pierce’s exhibition, “Thirty-six Views of Home,” addresses this tension as a visual rupture in an otherwise patterned, color-matched, organized interior.

The exhibition will be on view at The Alley Gallery from through Sept. 29. 2018. The gallery is open to the public during special events and holds the following regular gallery hours: Thursday and Friday, 12-5 p.m.; and Saturday, 11 a.m.-3 p.m. For more information, visit the Facebook page, or email vtalleygallery@gmail.com.

Mountain Times Newsletter

Sign up below to receive the weekly newsletter, which also includes top trending stories and what all the locals are talking about!