Meredith Broberg, installation view
January 20, 2006 – February 28, 2006
Meredith Broberg’s gallery installation, entitled “Matters,” combines drawings and prints with notes from artists, engineers, librarians, cooks, kids, inmates and others about what matters most in life. The images are glimpses of the stuff of every day – garden produce, dragonfly wings, friends’ faces, pine cones, plastic dinosaurs, etc. The notes are personal, anonymous responses to the quesion “What matters most in your life?” In bringing together images and words about daily life, Broberg hopes to illuminate how we pay attention to the matters of our own lives. “Daily life can seem so busy, that it’s easy for me to lose touch with what really matters. So sometimes there’s a gap between what I do during the day and what I value most. Drawing helps me bridge that gap – it’s a way for me to slow down and really pay attention to something or someone,” explains the artist. Ms. Broberg’s work often takes the form of artists’ books, which sparked her interest in juxtaposing words and images in this installation. She decided to include the handwritten notes because she “wanted there to be a text that was personal but that went beyond what I thought. I wanted to see if there would be any overlap in what matters most to a variety of people.”
Meredith Broberg received her MFA from the University of California at Berkeley. Since then, she has received several awards, including a Fulbright Fellowship in Costa Rica, and a scholarship to Anderson Ranch Art Center in Colorado. She lives in Easthampton, MA.
Margaret Jean exhibits a series of new prints entitled “Spaces,” which layer color and unrelated images “without intent.” Her new work has a randomness, suggestive of collage, that originated five years ago when she began sifting through her prints of 25 and 30 years ago. She felt a physical sense of freedom as she cut some up, saved others, printed new images on top of old ones, and threw a lot away. Jean also sites seeing John Cage’s prints made from shards of glass as an inspiration in creating this new body of work.
A resident of Amherst, MA, Margaret Jean grew up in Austin, Texas. She holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts and a BA and an MA from Mount Holyoke College. She describes her studies with Hans Hofmann after graduating from college as crucial in developing her feeling for color relationships. She has exhibited her work widely in group exhibitions and in solo shows in New England including exhibits at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, Amherst College, and at AIR Gallery in New York City. Her handmade books and prints are in the collections of the New York Public Library, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Wellesley College, and Houghton Library at Harvard University, among others.