The Northeastern Center for the Arts is pleased to partner with Kingston Gallery on the exhibition Mira Cantor: Meltwater
Ms. Cantor’s current body of work, Meltwater, tries to “freeze” the moment of the viewer’s encounter with the landscape into a fusion of perceiver and perceived in an attempt at stopping time. Cantor’s work continues to explore the boundaries of landscape and how juxtapositions of mountain forms, light, and air shift those boundaries. Her mountains are both monuments to life and references to tombstones. The work in this exhibition is the result of a 2010 Artist Residency in Banff, Alberta, Canada and the CAMD Summer Abroad program, lead by Ms. Cantor, at the Burren College of Art, in Ireland.
Mira Cantor was born in New York and graduated with an MFA from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. From 1978 to 1980, Cantor was a Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT. She was awarded a Fulbright to Alexandria, Egypt in 1994 where she taught and exhibited at the American Center. Her solo exhibitions include the Tokyo American Center in Japan, BWA Gallery in Krakow, Poland, Gallery Lohrl, Düsseldorf, Germany, Hampshire College Gallery, MA, DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, MA, Fitchburg Art Museum, MA, Contemporary Art Museum in Honolulu, and three solo exhibitions at the Genovese-Sullivan Gallery in Boston -1999, 2002 and 2005. Her drawings have been exhibited in biennales in Vienna, Norway, Yugoslavia and Poland. She is in many private and public collections across the U.S. Ms. Cantor lives and works in Boston and is a Professor of Art at Northeastern University.
Artist Talk with Mira Cantor: December 11 at 6pm
Kingston Gallery
450 Harrison Ave #43
Boston, MA
Exhibition: December 4- 29, 2013
Check out this review by the Boston Globe.
In Mira Cantor’s recent series paintings I am most moved by Specter in which a glacial mountain becomes a ghostly apparition rising up to lament the evaporation of its habitat. Cantor was on a residency in Banff when she witnessed first hand the effects of global warming that lead to this body of work. These landscape paintings, hovering on the brink of abstraction, show neither the cool detachment of Ellsworth Kelly nor the ecstatic sublimity of Arthur Dove. Instead they rebuke climate change deniers, paying tribute to the eroded climates of the North in an elegy to a quickly vanishing hyperborean sublime. In these works paint thickens and thins, clots and accrues in tribute to landscapes which will soon be submerged beneath rising tides or where nothing but eroded mounds of dirt will be left behind. The painting Meltwater, from which the show as a whole draws its name, offers a glimmer of hope with its mauve and orange cliff side. But this bit of cheer is deceptive as even the rocky cliff seems threatened by engulfment in the pasty green brine wavering around it. In these works mountains become tombstones, a difficult but necessary reminder for those of us living coastally, where, although we might not see the effects of climate change today as she did, we will surely feel those effects soon enough.
-William Kaizen, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Art History/Media Studies
Department of Art + Design
Northeastern University