Art and healing at Springfield’s Great Hall

From the rustle of conversation to the colorful tables of hors d’oeuvres, the Great Hall at 100 River Street was the perfect backdrop for the “Healing: The Transformative Imagery of Art” exhibit opening Thursday night.

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Art and healing at Springfield’s Great Hall By GLYNIS HART reporter@eagletimes.com 12 hrs ago 0 Healing exhibit Art appreciators gathered in the Great Hall at 100 River Street for ‘Healing: the Transformative Imagery of Art.’ GLYNIS HART SPRINGFIELD, Vt. – It might have been an art opening at a university, or at a chic gallery in a large city. From the rustle of conversation to the colorful tables of hors d’oeuvres, the Great Hall at 100 River Street, which provides one entryway into the Springfield Medical Center, was the perfect backdrop for the “Healing: The Transformative Imagery of Art” exhibit opening Thursday night. The exhibit includes the work of 12 artists on the theme of healing. It came together as a collaboration between the Springfield Regional Development Corporation and the medical center. “We’ve got some other events,” said Larry Kraft, the medical center’s director of development, “but this one is very special to us. Art has the power to heal both emotionally and psychologically.” The hospital has a history of engagement with art, he continued, to the extent that every patient’s room has two original pieces of art. Nina Jamison, director of exhibitions for SRDC, said, “This exhibit feels like the best of the seven we’ve done. I did a lot of research for this show – we should all be feeling a surge of dopamine right now.” Jamison said when she contacted artists with the theme for the exhibit, some had finished work that fit and others produced new art. “Some of the art was actually healing to the artists themselves,” she said. “Others, like Robert Carsten’s flower pictures, bring a smile to the viewer.” Carsten’s vividly bright flower paintings reflect the findings of a study that flowers in patients’ rooms, or even pictures of flowers, helped brighten the patients’ outlook. Adjacent to Carsten’s work were hung stained glass works by Karen Deets, who produced several pieces on the theme, from “Keep your focus,” which is about keeping your focus on what’s important during illness and stressful times, to this writer’s favorite, which shows a pastoral scene at the end of a long row of tract houses, a sort of light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel depiction. Cai Xi’s luminous landscapes take this traditional form of art and somehow manage to imbue serene landscapes with tension; with the breath of escape one takes upon finding oneself utterly alone in the outdoors. Pat Musick’s series “The Instant of It All,” is about the aging process. These works on Japanese kono paper, made from mulberry trees with the bark on, depict a tree in the fall with its translucent leaves shedding. The tree floats in the center of the picture, unrooted: “They levitate somewhere between earth and heaven,” Musick said. Glass artist Robert DuGrenier’s sculptures of melted glass and old iron implements and antiques were created to save and transform some of what was left when the barn at his home burned down. It was not only an antique barn, built in the early 19th century, but it was filled with precious artifacts he’d collected over a lifetime. DuGrenier said as the bulldozers were scooping up the rubble of the fire, he interrupted to save the old tools and parts. “My favorite shovel I had used all my life – I couldn’t bear for it to go in the landfill.” Among the melted artifacts he found one of the kerosene lanterns used at his wedding and inadvertently discovered a way to make the art now on exhibit. “Normally, when glass and metal are melted together they have a different coefficient of expansion, so the glass shatters. But because of all the carbon from the wood burning in the barn, it coated all the metal with carbon. The glass never bonded to the metal.” Exhibitor Margaret Jacobs’ works celebrate her culture, she is a St. Regis Mohawk. “I am interested in exploring the tension and harmony between man-made objects and those occuring in nature,” she writes in her statement on the exhibit. Mary Admasian’s moving “Weighted tears” hangs near the entryway, and gained significance as the sun began to set and the light through the hall’s great windows turned blue. Five “tears” made of wire and barbed wire, in descending order of size, are suspended from the ceiling. In the smallest one, a tiny light shines. Other artists, no less affecting than those mentioned, were Neomi Lauritsen of Weathersfield, a quilt artist, Robert O’Brien of Perkinsville, watercolors, Priscilla Petraska, quilt artist, and Natalie Blake of Brattleboro, ceramic artis, and Carolyn Enz Hack, sculptor, of Thetford. The exhibit will be up until March, however many of the pieces are for sale.