Ellen C. Gower, A Retrospective: ab ovo usque ad mala (from eggs to apples)

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Organisé par :

Menino Arts Center

This exhibition is lovingly dedicated to the memory of Ellen by Ellen's sister, Holly Boots and friends Ann Turley, Maria Luongo, Jane Estella, Tamara Safford, and Sasja Lucas.

Curated by Holly Boots, Sasja Lucas,Ann Turley, Maria Luongo, Jane Estella, Tamara Safford.


MAC Curator, Sasja Lucas


The title of this exhibition and catalogue, ab ovo usque ad mala (from eggs to apples), was once used by the artist, Ellen C. Gower, to describe a series of still life photographs she exhibited in 2005 and 2006. She explained at the time that “[t]he epigram refers to the Roman banquet (for us it would be soup to nuts), but it has acquired the connotations of from beginning to end, birth to death and alpha to omega. Eggs to apples runs the gamut of the human lifespan.” In light of this understanding, it was deemed an appropriate title for the present catalogue as well, which provides a retrospective window into Ellen’s artistic output over many decades, from oil paintings during her teenage years in the late 1950’s to pen and ink drawings during the years before her death in 2021.

Artistic expression was always an important part of Ellen’s life, although she initially pursued a career in science. She was educated at Swarthmore College and earned a PhD in neuroscience from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For many years thereafter she conducted and published research on cognition and memory while affiliated with the Boston Veterans Administration Medical Center, Boston University Medical School, and Tufts University. But her youthful passion for art never waned, and she continued to engage in drawing and painting for pleasure. After she moved on from her scientific career, she studied at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and The School of the Museum of Fine Arts. She then turned back with renewed energy to drawing, painting, and photography, especially of the natural world, and exhibited her work through many local arts organizations.

In describing how she approached her art, Ellen once stated that, because of her background as a neuroscientist who had long been interested in how the brain, mind, memory and cognition work, her concern in art, as in science, had been with “exploring where meaning originates and memory resides, using multiple media to produce images that would encourage the viewer to create their own projections.”

She explained, “[i]t is quite likely that the meanings manifested are completely different for every viewer. Or maybe they are not. After all, we share a large and complex suite of inner forces, intentions, joys, fears and delusions that we refer externally, including into the very pictures before us, as we build a world around ourselves in which we find ourselves at home. Therefore, I like to encourage you, the viewer, to enrich the images you see here by finding your own resonances in them, and to think they very well might have been mine too. Either way, we have communicated.”

In keeping with this concept, Ellen’s first one-woman public showing of her paintings and prints in 2003 was entitled, “The dialogue of perception and reality: You gotta change your mind.” A local newspaper article discussing the exhibition noted that “[w]hether or not [she] is conscious [of] the seeming paradox, she does give a scientific flavor to much of her work. Many of her acrylic-on-paper paintings feature layered, dribbled shapes that resemble slides of brain cells from ninth grade biology. These shapes sit atop one another in shades of red, brown, blue and black - looking chaotic but suggesting order.” In contrast, “[h]er photo work is the opposite: ordered but suggesting chaos. [S]he shoots extreme close-ups of grass, water, and dew on

leaves. The subjects are familiar, but the level of magnification makes the natural look nether-worldly.” Ellen elaborated that [i]t’s the chaotic element which, I think, is important in allowing other people to find their own thing in the work. . . . It’s interesting to hear people’s commentary and see how their thoughts add to what they see.”
Ellen’s early paintings were mostly oil on canvas depictions of scenes in and around the town of Rockport, Massachusetts, where she spent a summer during her high school years and won a prize at the town’s summer art show. She subsequently discontinued oil painting and experimented with abstract watercolor paintings consisting of thin bands in pastel hues floating on canvas and with fast drying acrylics, which, she stated, “helps drive away the desire for perfection.” Her figure drawings rendered many years later in flamboyant lines and colors and her pastel portraits, which tend to focus on character rather than photographic detail, likewise reflect her desire to avoid constraints and stimulate the viewer’s imagination.
Her more recent interest in photography, particularly of the natural world, was perhaps most influenced by her scientific research and microscopic examination of the brain. She explained that “[neurology] has a perceptual process that is artistic in nature, especially when you get in really close, you get down into the tissue.” This is seen most clearly in her extreme close-ups of plant life that feature unique detail and color. In summing up her approach, she said: “I want to leave the real world behind to show how our perceptions of familiar things can disappear under certain circumstances. . . . Then you’re free to see what you want.” This was also the reason she deliberately gave ambiguous titles, or no titles at all, to many of her photographs, including cityscapes, landscapes, and still lifes such as “. . . a tangled web,” “the moon is reflected in every drop,” “means of apprehension: edge” and “intimacy.” She wrote, “I supply some titles” but, as previously noted, she wanted to encourage the viewer to enrich the images by “finding [their] own resonances in them . . . .”
Ellen came to learn in a very direct way almost ten years later that this hope had been fulfilled. A high school poetry teacher in a nearby town who had brought her class to visit a local art museum exhibition asked her students to create a poem for something they had seen that intrigued them. One student selected a still life photograph by Ellen, titled “degrees of separation,” and the teacher sent her a copy of his response. In the introduction to his poem, the student wrote: "Compositions tend to have a secret meaning, or hide a message in their art that the viewers are able to grasp or understand. . . . [“degrees of separation”] was . . . an image that appeared to be an abstract painting but was actually the image of an egg next to its holder. This imagery reached me because of its secrecy and confidentiality. I was compelled to write a poem about this piece because I feel the poem was meant to be a metaphor [for] one’s life - someone who lives in secrecy himself. I felt that pain of [living] in secret, and that was my drive to write a poem for this piece.” In taking a close-up photograph of two familiar objects, an egg and its holder, from a unique perspective and giving it an ambiguous title, Ellen implicitly encouraged the viewer in this case to use his own life experience and perceptions of reality to inform his understanding of the image, just as she had wished.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue that includes more images than are exhibited here.

Credits:
Design, Leslie Ann Feagley
Photographer, Erik Gehring
Curators, Holly Gower Boots, Sasja Lucas

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