Frame 301's Summer Constellation

A New Constellation Discovered in Beverly

 Montserrat College of Art is please to announce Adria Arch's installation, Summer Constellation, curated by Lydia Gordon. The artist's multi-media piece radiates twenty-four hours a day in the Frame 301 window. With Summer Constellation's suspended materials, particular doodles and celestial imagery, Adria uses the street-side gallery as a portal to encourage connection among anonymous participants.

Adria Arch’s Summer Constellation exhibits the artist’s distinctive mark making in a three dimensional installation. Patterns of scribbles, sprays and drips are produced on multiple ten by three foot suspended mylar scrolls. By studying notebook doodles produced by her son, the artist revisits these spontaneous characters to execute the composition of each scroll. The interplay among the imagery evokes a patterning of symbols similar to how the stars appear in the night sky. Arch’s placement of suspended scrolls and cut out paper creates a dynamic visual dialog of the artist’s iconic shapes, speaking to the community of viewers on the street, as well as to the artist’s son.

Adria is inspired by the doodles found in the margins of her son’s high school notebooks. The artist reads these private drawings as an indecipherable language created in the uninhibited state of the doodler. Using these shapes as a source for her work in Summer Constellation, Arch invites her audience into a world unknown to them but extremely personal to her. The installation allows for a viewing experience that creates relationships between multiple sources, mapping an intricate grouping of connections like the patterns formed by prominent starts in a constellation.

Adria Arch is a Boston-based artist and Arts Administrator. She studied at RISD and Carnegie Mellon University for her undergraduate studies and earned her MA in Art Education from the University of Arizona. Adria also received her MFA in painting from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. The artist has taught at deCordova’s School, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and Montserrat College of Art. Arch has recently shown at the Danforth Museum of Art (Framingham, MA) and Lesley University (Cambridge, MA).

Where: Montserrat College of Art, Frame 301, 301 Cabot Street, Beverly, MA

Exhibit Dates: July 9, 2011 – August  20, 2011

Hours: 24/7

For more information about the exhibit, please contact Lydia Gordon, Frame 301 Project Manager at Lydia.Gordon01@gmail.com or visit us at www.montserrat.edu/galleries.

Events hotline: 978.921.4242 Option 3