Thomas Matsuda
Works On Paper Created At MacDowell Colony
with work by guest musician David Dominique
February 4 – March 14, 2025
Matsuda, Purification Print, charcoal on Arches paper, 20.75 x 23.5 inches Dominique, Modular Synthesizer, color photograph
Artist Statement
The work in this exhibition was created during an artist residency at MacDowell Colony, NH in 2020. This exhibition was postponed due to the COVID pandemic. I used burned discs from previous sculpture/performance installations. I am interested in art that is created when we lose ourselves in the creative process. I am striving for this by removing myself from direct mark-making. I was excited to meet David Dominique and learn that his sound recordings generated by a modular synthesizer were similar to this approach. Rubbings were made from the burnt discs. The prints were burnt discs dropped on wet printmaking paper and run through an etching press. The two large square color fields were started during a residency at Haslla Art World, South Korea. It was located on the Sea of Japan, and I watched the ocean meet the sky every morning.
A renowned sculptor in Japan, Koukei Eri, said that one can sense in old sculptures, “a mysterious strength that has the power to touch and penetrate our spirits.” As a contemporary artist, it is my aspiration to evoke this spirit.
I began my formal studies as an artist at Pratt Institute and then printing artist’s lithographs in New York. I traveled to Japan and lived there for twelve years. During that time I apprenticed under the sculptor, Koukei Eri, and sculpted in wood and stone. I created over two hundred sculptures in Japan for businesses, individual patrons, villages, temples, and shrines, and exhibited in many major cities. Returning to America, I am bringing a culmination of all of my experiences and ideas together in my work. I carve traditional Buddhist sculptures, and I synthesize eastern and western ideas in a contemporary approach.
Fire, air, water, earth, and space are the five elements in eastern culture. I use these natural elements in my work, often burning wood. Each time, my work evolves with the situation, site, inspiration, and materials. I have created large installations often with performance components at many venues. I have collaborated with dance troupes, musicians, Buddhist monks, and Native Americans. I deal with the environment, natural and human, addressing environmental issues, cultural relationships, and the integration of art, culture, and spirituality.
Charred wood and blackened earth conjure up ideas of life, death, and rebirth, as well as the burning away of illusions and desires -a reference to the fierce deities of Tibetan Buddhism that represent cutting through or overcoming our desires. Yet it can also be seen as a reminder of war, destruction of the earth, corruption within ourselves, and the close relationship between purification and destruction.
…sacred writing speaks the word of the Great Spirit, what shall we bring forth, purification or destruction? Hopi Prophecy
About the Artists
Thomas Matsuda and David Dominque met at MacDowell Colony in 2020. This exhibition includes work Thomas and David developed during their awarded residency at the Colony. David Dominique, collaborating musician, created sound deployed by a modular synthesizer, modeled to expand the perceptual space implied by the works on paper in this exhibition.
Thomas Matsuda lived in Japan for twelve years where he apprenticed with the sculptor, Koukei Eri. His outdoor sculptures are in sculpture parks, parks, and universities nationally and internationally. He has exhibited in Latvia, South Korea, UK, Qatar, Egypt, Germany, Beijing, Hungary, Rumania, India, and Japan. His awards include MacDowell Colony Residency, Gottlieb Foundation Grant, US Embassy Grant, Japan Foundation Grant, and Ford Foundation Grant. He is Professor Emeritus, Mount Wachusett Community College; taught for eight years at Pratt Institute; and eight years at College of New Rochelle Graduate School. He received a BFA from Pratt Institute and MFA from UMass, Amherst. He carves traditional Buddhist sculptures and synthesizes eastern and western ideas in a contemporary approach. His work deals with the environment, natural and human, addressing environmental issues, cultural relationships, and the integration of art, culture, and spirituality.
David Dominique is a composer, performer and music theorist living in Richmond, Virginia. He is the 2022-2023 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Music Composition, and the 2021-2022 Frances B. Cashin Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. His compositional output includes contemporary chamber music, jazz, electroacoustic music, installation, rock and theater. Additional fellowships and awards include The Mellon Foundation, The Bogliasco Foundation, The American Music Center, and The Max Kade Foundation. He has been the Aaron Copland Fellow at MacDowell, the Alonzo Davis Fellow at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and a resident artist Yaddo, and Djerassi Resident Artist Program. David holds an undergraduate degree from NYU, a Master of Music degree from California State U, Northridge, and an MFA and PhD from Brandeis U. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of Music at the College of William and Mary.
Thomas Matsuda
Facebook: thomas.matsuda
Instagram: @thomasmatsuda
Website: tmatsuda.com
David Dominique
Music: dominique.bandcamp.com
Instagram: @daviddominique
Website: daviddominique.com
Valcros: Trees, 2024, digital/photographic drawing, 12 x 16 in.
Drawings 2011 – 2024 by
Copper Giloth
November 7 – December 5, 2024
Artist Statement
I am a collector of details that, when strung together, form visual stories about the landscape of daily life. Forty-five years ago, these stories began to emerge as I wrote programs on a ZGRASS personal computer. Somehow this technology allowed me the freedom to integrate visuals, voice, animation, and, at times, humor. Exposed to early computer systems and surrounded by the complex quilts of my mother and grandmother, I naturally gravitated toward formal structures, especially the grid. The grid has no built-in hierarchy, allowing it to promote the value of equality. I use this precept as a foundation in my work.
This exhibition includes works from four drawing/print series completed between 2011 and 2024.
Born out of a desire to understand my mother’s quilt-making endeavors, the Mother-Daughter BIOGrid series are rooted in her eighth-grade drawings of the lifecycle of a plant. Replicating my mother’s quilt making process, I collected jpg and png files of digitally generated plants, rather than fabric scraps, to create new works.
The Alphabet Gestures series is a response to a prompt to make works about the teapot, which is a symbol for the field of computer graphics since its asymmetrical form with convex and concave surfaces was used to test early 3D modelling and rendering algorithms. In 2006 I visualized and played with a vocabulary of 1,243 computer graphics terms (from 1960–2006) combined with 231 words from the history of teapots. Given that our language expands as new technologies emerge, I used a digital laser cutter in the 2018 series to burn some of the new technical terms through the older language.
During the COVID lockdown, delivery notification email messages that I received from Amazon started to include photos of the packages in situ on my porch. It was a small unintentional still life image in low-resolution. I collected these photos and a story of COVID loneliness and porch interactions evolved into the artist book DELIVERIES and large-scale prints.
Half the year I live in the city center of Aix-en-Provence in southern France. Looming over the city is Mount Saint Victoire, made famous by Cezanne’s paintings. Visiting a friend’s family house in the outskirts of Aix on a November afternoon, I walked on dirt roads lined with pine trees and I experienced extreme color shifts as I wandered through a landscape defined by streams of sun light that was quickly transformed with the arrival of bulbous grey clouds. The Valcros drawings are a response to that afternoon.
Copper Giloth works and lives between Amherst, MA and Aix-en-Provence, France. Her work has been screened and exhibited in group and solo exhibitions in numerous locations in the U.S, Europe, and Japan. In November 2024 her work will be included in the exhibition Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). In February 2020 she released “Labyrinth-of-Fables VR,” a fully immersive app where one can experience the now destroyed 17th century Labyrinth of Versailles. Much of her earliest work was among the pioneering efforts in the then nascent field of computer art and computer graphics. She is a featured contributor in New Media Futures: The Rise of Women in the Digital Arts (2018) published by the University of Illinois Press. She organized the first two international ACM Siggraph Art Show competitions in 1982 and 1983. Giloth is a Professor Emerita at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Instagram: @coppergilothstudio
Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/user39846312
Jason Kotoch
Between hello and goodbye.
Between the mountain and sky.
September 4 – October 5
Gallery Talk: Sept. 26, at 4 pm Reception: Sept 26, 4:30 – 6:30 pm
Artist Statement
“Between hello and goodbye—Between the mountain and the sky is a phrase my Jido whispered into my ear in a dream I had the night before he died. Or maybe that was how my grandmother described the perfect ratio of milk to flour while teaching me how to make her drop biscuit recipe once when I was eleven. Then again, I think it might have been the way the music felt during the motorcycle scene at the end of Kiarostami’s film, Close Up. This exhibit attempts to point to things unsaid, or maybe even unsayable, from the perspective of a second generation American who grew up floating between two cultures, two cuisines, two languages. It is an attempt to describe the experience of watching cultural assimilation exercise its power on my family in real time.”
Jason Kotoch is an intermedia artist working in still and moving images, performance, and sound art. Jason grew up in a working class Lebanese American family and his work explores cultural assimilation, identity, memory and the politics of everyday life. Jason Kotoch is an MWCC alum, and a graduate student in the department of art at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Instagram: @jasonkotoch
Machines Choose You (series), 2022, xerox transfer, pen, graphite powder, 22 x 30 in.
Recent work by
Jenny Vogel
October 9 – 31, 2024
Artist Statement
“My work explores subjective themes as they are experienced in the digital age. I examine the anxiety of alienation, the desires of communication and a sense of belonging in a virtual world. Featuring digital prints, drawings, animation and sculptures made within the last year, All Things Already Lost is a reflection on the loss of the body in the digital world.
I am strangely fascinated by the lives we live online. Perhaps this is the result of being brought up without a TV, in an environment that valued handicraft skills over technology. My childhood experiences in that regard were not the norm even back then but are even more exceptional today as participation in the digital or virtual world is becoming less and less a matter of choice. I observe all of this with a healthy dose of skepticism but also fascination. Through my work I am orienting myself in this world, trying to will a level of personal connection and emotions into the algorithm, constantly searching for the irrational, the glitch, the mystical or simply the unexpected. These attempts are all bound to fail, sometimes comically, sometimes tragically and sometimes in revelatory ways.
To speak about the virtual world, I often employ the same tools that are used to create it. 3D simulation software, AI text or image generators are used simultaneously and indiscriminately alongside drawing and sculpting in plaster. The work in the exhibition suggests plausible worlds at first sight that collapse into hauntingly beautiful meshes, vertices and points.”
Jenny Vogel lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been screened and exhibited in group and solo exhibitions in numerous locations and galleries: Storefront Gallery, NYC; The Dallas Museum of Art, TX; McKinney Contemporary, TX; San Francisco Camerawork, CA; Arnolfini, UK; The Siberia Biennial, Russia; The Swiss Institute, NYC; EFA Gallery, NYC; Kunstwerke, Berlin; PS1 Contemporary Art Center, NYC. She received her MFA from Hunter College (NYC) in 2003. She is a 2005 NYFA fellow in Computer Arts and is currently Associate Professor and Department Chair of Studio Art at the University of Massachusetts.
Instagram: @j.vogel
39th Annual
Regional Exhibition Of High School Art
April 2 – 23, 2025
Reception & Presentation Of Awards
Thursday, April 17 from 6:00 to 8:00 pm
Awards presented at 6:30 pm
Refreshments will be served.
Each spring the Art Department invites all area high schools to participate in our Annual Regional High School Art Exhibition and competition. This event provides an opportunity to celebrate he work of high school art students and the dedicated art teachers who make this exhibit possible.
The exhibition includes student work from:
Athol High School
Contoocook Valley Regional High School
Leominster High School
Quabbin Regional High School
Ralph C. Mahar Regional High School
Shepherd Hill Regional High School
Wachusett Regional High School
Exhibition Dates: November 15 – December 20, 2018
Artist Presentation And Q & A:
