A Movable Feast Opening Reception

Readymade Gallery is pleased to present the final show of the 2024 season, A Moveable Feast, on view from October 5th to November 1st. The show presents work by Sarah Dineen, Garrett Dutton (aka G-Love), Robin Kang, Ryan Kish, Melanie Kozol, Rebecca McGee Tuck, Elisa Montilla, Peter Schenck, Whiting Tennis, and Scott Whipkey.

Ernest Hemingway, in his memoir of the same title, used the phrase “a movable feast” as a metaphor for the places and times that sustain us in memory long after we have moved on. There is a bittersweetness to the phrase, embracing as it does the spirit of transiency and the knowledge that all things must end - even before they begin. As we close out a thirteenth successful season for the DNA Artist Residency and the second season of Readymade Gallery, and as summer turns to fall, this is a time for reflection and gratitude for the particular moment that was summer 2024.

A Moveable Feast can be taken at face value, referring in part to the animated artists' dinner parties hosted throughout the summer by Nick Lawrence, on the deck of his Eastham home, a staple of the DNA experience. These feasts, full of camaraderie and exchange of ideas, are hallmarks of every successful residency. This exhibition seeks to capture and recreate some of that energy, incorporating works from artist-residents that commemorate their time in Provincetown, punctuating their lives at a specific time and place outside of the fabric and routine of their daily lives, and rarified by a predetermined end date.

This metaphor of the fabric of life is brought to the fore quite literally by the work of three textile artists. Brooklyn-based artist Robin Kang plays with the language of ancient spirituality and contemporary technology in her delicately woven yarn pieces, to create meditative talismans or prayer flags. Rebecca McGee Tuck engages with the archival nature of her medium, weaving discarded materials found on beach walks into multi-faceted textiles that catalog and memorialize humanity’s relationship with nature, and the waste we leave behind. Elisa Montilla, who lives and works in LA and Spain, creates finely turned wooden pieces, one of which serves as a frame for stretched red lace, almost like a place setting at a table.

Peter Schenck and Melanie Kozol take a more direct view of the “feast” theme. Schenck’s Still Life After Beckmann presents a blood-red, semi-abstract still life of fish and flowers on a table in homage to German expressionist Max Beckmann. The piece looks backward into the annals of art history and forwards into Schenck’s contemporary practice, examining what we glean from the past to fuel the future, using

a potpourri of influences and references. Kozol, on the other hand, brings a more traditional approach to a non-traditional subject for a still life – a Buddha’s Hand fruit – bridging this gap between the past and the present, the expected and the new.

Scott Whipkey’s practice is one of multiples. Often revisiting the same composition and imagery in different colors as though trying to find some universal, integral truth, Whipkey’s pieces perform similarly to the process of memory itself; a revisiting and reimagining through different nostalgic lenses. By contrast, Ryan Kish paints singular moments, captured once and never again. On his canvases, the slanting of light through a window or the movement of seagrass on a dune is rendered with an almost frantic immediacy, as though to snapshot every aspect of a second in time.

Garrett Dutton, who is primarily known as the musician G-Love, an organizer of the Outermost Roots and Blues Festival (a Cape mainstay that takes place on October 12th and 13th), celebrates the word "Love" in a rainbow of colors and forms. The transient lifestyle of a touring musician turns his practice into his own kind of “musical feast"; hyper-mobile and multifaceted, while still calling the Cape his home. This mobility comes through in the wide geography from which the artists originate. Cape and NY-based Sarah Dineen sculpts and paints in textured, geometric abstraction; while the linear abstraction of Whiting Tennis’ organic works on paper comes to us from the Pacific Northwest.

Though hailing from all over the world, from both city and country, these artists are brought together by the shared, brief experience of the residency itself, using the language of their practice to define and shape a Moveable Feast. Via diverse perspectives, A Movable Feast celebrates the spirit of the temporary transplant, the fluid nature of the Cape itself, and the short season of the artists' gallery and residency.

With special thanks to all our friends and followers of DNA Residency and Readymade Gallery. See you on October 5th!