Events at this location

Andrew Moore May 31- July 7, 2024

KMR Arts is proud to announce the opening of our exhibit, The Spell of Time, by Andrew Moore. This is Moore’s first exhibit at KMR Arts. Please join us for the opening reception and book signing with the artist, Saturday, June 1, 2024, from 2-5pm. Andrew Moore’s photographs create a narrative of a sense of place and time as it affects the natural landscape.

Andrew Moore’s exploration of the Hudson River, Catskill Mountains, and New England’s landscapes has yielded photographs of sublime mystery. These images combine seemingly disparate qualities: beauty and decay, fragility and strength, beginnings and endings. The themes of the Hudson River School painting, discovery, exploration, settlement, are as evident in Moore’s photographs as they are in the paintings of Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church.

Andrew Moore speaks about this body of work: “Here is a forest wading into a river. Here, a tangle of saplings penning a private script. Here is an artist in the act of making a landscape, a picture that feels familiar–didn’t Cole paint that? Didn’t Church? –just as the place itself often feels familiar. When the first American painters made pictures of the Hudson River Valley, they saw the landscape as uniquely wild, its mountains, forests and rivers a sublime symbol for the vast wilderness of the so-called New World. But of course, this world was not new, not wild, not, in the end, even that vast. And images of it went from mysterious to familiar with astonishing speed–from painting to lithograph to dinner plate to beaded belt, until the actual landscapes came to feel like folding picture postcards of themselves. And today, any Instagrammer can put herself in the picture. The Hudson River Art Trail offers images at trailheads with the tagline “Step into a landscape painting.” Snap, tag, post–I was here–and then we too become one more piece of digitized data, one more ghost in the machine.”

“Nature is a haunted house,” wrote Emily Dickinson, “but Art — a house that tries to be haunted.” If the photographs have a sense of unease, it’s a fruitful unease, a productive haunting. What is this place? The elements themselves shift their shapes. The Hudson River is not really a river but a tidal fjord; the Catskill Mountains are not really mountains but an eroding plateau. The wilderness is not really a wilderness but a factory that fell asleep and woke up twenty years later to find itself crumbling. This place is not really a place but an event, a location unfolding in time, drunk on its own story, as we are always drunk on ours. And like the train speeding ahead in the darkness, the sheep unsure of how to proceed, we are elements in this place’s story. We have no idea how it ends.”

Moore’s work is represented in numerous public collections in the United States and internationally, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., the Israel Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, and the Detroit Institute of Arts. Four monographs of his work have been published: Inside Havana (2002, Chronicle); Russia (2005, Chronicle); Detroit Disassembled (2010, Damiani); and Andrew Moore: Cuba (2012, Damiani).

KMR Arts is proud to announce the opening of Diana Weymar: Everything I Touched, from August 24 through October 19, 2024. Please join us for an opening reception with the artist, Saturday, August 24, from 3-5 pm. This exhibit is Weymar’s first exhibit at KMR Arts.

Diana Weymar is a renowned textile artist and pioneer in the growing world of “craftivism,” a movement that combines art and activism to address social and political issues. Weymar grew up in the rugged wilderness of Northern British Columbia, where she learned early on the value of resourcefulness: “Everything we had and did was a creative act of survival.” She later studied creative writing at Princeton University.

Everything I Touched is a collection of compelling quotations meticulously stitched on found fabrics such as vintage handkerchiefs and cocktail napkins. The quotations, explore themes of love, identity, and resilience. The act of transforming stitching into art creates an almost subversive result, more powerful than reading the text on its own.

In this work, Weymar seeks out connections, rather than differences. The viewer pauses and processes not only what they are seeing, but how they are seeing it. These are objects that would not have any value and would have been discarded unless someone stopped to appreciate them.

As a “domestic art”, embroidery has historically been associated with women’s work, along with pottery, candle-making, weaving, and knitting, The “domestic arts” have also traditionally transcended class, race, and nationality. Just as quilting bees in the American South served both social and practical purposes, Diana Weymar’s work has gathered momentum with its “call and response” process, drawing individuals from wide-ranging backgrounds and geographical locations together, as they unite and collaborate.

The tactile allure of the embroidery adds a physical dimension to the art, allowing viewers to feel the textures and appreciate the work that goes into each and every stitch: “What makes these pieces powerful is because the handwork is evident,” Weymar says. “It’s so personal.”

Weymar’s groundbreaking textiles are inviting and jarring, playful and serious, dainty and powerful. Weymar splashes pastel backdrops and stiches intricate patterns to complement the quotations. Each piece invites viewers to engage with it on multiple levels, creating a dynamic interplay between text, texture, and meaning.

Gallery owner, Kathy McCarver says, “From the moment I saw Diana’s work, I wanted to learn more about it, own it, and exhibit it. This work is intimate and human, an antidote to our loud, impersonal, mass-marketed, mass-produced world. This modern world, with its advances and progress, has rendered humans disconnected. This compelling work is an attempt to connect us through words and thoughts.”

Weymar has fostered a sense of community surrounding her projects, encouraging others to send in their textiles or stitch their own pieces. Throughout her career, Weymar has collaborated with organizations such as Build Peace, the Arts Council of Princeton, and the Nantucket Atheneum. Her work has been showcased across the United States and Canada, receiving international acclaim for its innovative artistic approach.

If you would like more information, please email [email protected].