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Concord Art Association | Juried By Sarah Montross, Senior Curator DeCordova Museum

Excerpt from

Art New England review

Semblances of Place

exhibit at Concord Art

By Olivia J. Kiers

The winter appearance of Concord, MA is quiet, and often swathed in great patches of snow. Yet a bright, colorful, urban world awaits this winter at Concord Art, where the work of three Massachusetts artists is on display. Semblances of Place (through February 10) creates a great escape from the ordinary for those fortunate to catch it on view.

Painter Anna Herrick takes New York City as her muse in most of her work in this exhibition, turning the hubbub of the Big Apple into surprisingly contemplative and inviting urban landscapes. “There’s a human quality to all these structures, whether people are present or not. Even as a kid, I’d ride the subway and feel a sense of melancholy coming out of the place,” she explains.

The melancholy present in Herrick’s New York carries an understated humor. In SoHo, a hunched figure glimpsed walking alone down a sidewalk doesn’t evoke Edward Hopper as much as it does cover art for The New Yorker. Here, the Soho neighborhood becomes a welcoming blanket of buildings that box the figure in place, as if sheltering him from a noisy world. Even the boarded up or curtained windows fail to distance the viewer, who is entranced by their patterns. Elsewhere, Herrick uses the strengths of multimedia for a similar effect. The graphite skies in Midtown 1 set skyscrapers within an atmospheric intensity that captivates despite the work’s small size. Her cityscapes let the imagination roam wild.

https://artnewengland.com/blogs/semblances-of-place-at-concord-art/