Presented by MIFA Victory Theatre and Wistariahurst Museum
Opening Reception
Date: Friday, June 3, 2016
Time: 5:30PM - 9PM
Venue: Wistariahurst Museum, 238 Cabot St, Holyoke, MA
Tickets: FREE & Open to the Public, Cash Bar
Amor Fati & Motion Focus, an evening of art and music featuring recent paintings by Christopher Willingham and music by Anders Griffen. Christopher Willingham's work combines materials and environments blending drawing, painting, sculptural installation, photography and critical writing. In Amor Fati, “love of fate,” he evokes themes from classical mythology with color and forms revealing powerful images in exploratory abstraction. He describes the overall effect of the work as offering a Stoic meditation on life as a transformative process and on the aesthetic as life itself.
MIFA Debut: In Motion Focus, Anders Griffen on drums & trumpet, with Chris Gentes, tenor saxophone, and Daniel Plane, cello, will play in solo, duo, and trio settings, balancing individual contributions to group improvisation borrowing from classical, jazz, and folk idioms.
Opening Reception begins at 5:30PM and Music begins at 7PM
About the Artist:
Exhibition: Amor Fati: Paintings and Drawings by Christopher Willingham
Adjunct professor of visual arts at Holyoke Community College, Christopher Willingham shares his recent paintings and drawings. Charged with mark and color, and evoking themes from classical mythology, these powerful images reveal emergent forms and compositions in a language of exploratory abstraction. Grounded in vivid materiality, they record the search not for specific objects, but for an emotional exactitude—a specificity of feeling in which features of light, landscape, weather, and organic form pulse as elements of urgent process. Naming his creative engagement as amor fati, “love of fate,” the artist offers his works as a Stoic meditation on life as eternal, transformative process, and on the aesthetic as life itself. In an exuberant exchange of chance and vernacular, he proceeds not by merely accepting as necessary the often fraught activity of making and living, but by loving it.
Exhibition on display June 3 - July 30, 2016
Wistariahurst Museum, 238 Cabot St, Holyoke, MA 01040
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