Pleiades Gallery is pleased to present “Heather Stivison: Borders and Boundaries,” which will be on view from June 11 to July 6, 2024. In this exhibition, Stivison—who is best known for works that explore the intersection of environmental science and visual art—debuts new artworks on the timely theme of borders.

The fourteen works in the exhibition are a tapestry of drawings, found objects, textiles, and paintings that reference both physical borders and emotional boundaries. Abandoning her rich colorful palette, these new works feature a palette dominated by black, white, and grey, and address historical and contemporary borders issues through the eyes of a mother.

Stivison states that the 48” x 97” oil painting entitled Oil Sketch: Her Inheritance, is the key to the entire series. Intent faces that are partially obscured by bars and barriers fill more than half the canvas. Ominous suggestions of drones fly overhead, while the central figure, an infant girl sitting on coils of razor wire reaches up as if to catch a drone in her hand. Stivison asks, “What kind of world are we leaving to our children?”

The personal authenticity of her question ripples through all the works. She prods and pokes at her own comfortable life and that of her peers. A suburban real estate survey serves as background to a drawing of the artist’s own suburban white picket fence, which on close inspection reveals tiny red letters stating “not my problem.”

Themes of losing one’s home, of remembering a home, of yearnings for homes overlay her narratives of migration. “After all,” she asks, “isn’t that what migration is about? The heartbreak of leaving a familiar home that is no longer safe for our children, the hard work and hope for a better future, and the often-unattainable dream of the security of a place to call our own…”

Art critic Don Wilkinson said of Stivison, writing in The New Bedford Standard-Times, “Much of her imagery, although clearly rooted in reality, flirts with the abstract. It is that nexus between the two poles where she is most comfortable as an artist. In the space of visual disruption, she opens herself up to the possibility of different narratives than simple observation might deliver.”

RECEPTION: THURSDAY, JUNE 13 6- 8 pm

SPECIAL PROGRAM: SATURDAY, JUNE 15, 3:30 pm
“CITY OF DREAMS” a conversation with author Tyler Anbinder