A Stone-Transforming Smile Sarah Carlson, Kirstie McCallum, Pamela Nelson, and Susan N. Stewart

As part of our 2019 Summer Program, the Red Head Gallery is pleased to present, A Stone-Transforming Smile, a group exhibition featuring Sarah Carlson, Kirstie McCallum, Pamela Nelson, and Susan N. Stewart. A reception will be held on Thursday, August 29, 5 to 8 PM.

The title of this exhibition comes from the poem “Roman Fountain” by Rainer Maria Rilke. The poem expresses the emotive, affective qualities that the poet discovers in a simple stone fountain.

A Stone-Transforming Smile explores themes of close-looking and deep aesthetic appreciation of natural and manmade objects, through art. The exhibition makes the case, through art, that we need to address the non-human things of the world with care and attention, because they deeply enrich our lives in quiet ways. Thematically, the exhibition celebrates life and water: works like Susan Stewart’s “Alter,” or Kirstie McCallum’s “Antennas to the Sky” are made to invite viewers to look deeply at humble organic forms. Sarah Carlson brings together plants and stone in her hand-made stalactites, which represent lakeshore caverns. Pamela Nelson’s “Folds and a Meteor (aka Danger!)” speaks to the fragile and precarious, whether that is our human cultures our or natural ecosystems. “A Stone-Transforming Smile speaks softly but urgently about the need to protect that which enriches our lives: our watersheds, our visible and invisible natural worlds, and our human cultural histories that are intimately entwined with these things.