By Holly Laws, artist, and Charlotte Meehan, playwright
FEBRUARY 23 – APRIL 7, 2013
Opening Reception: Friday, February 22, 6 – 8 pm (with comments by artist 7:30 pm)
Other accompanying programs to be announced.
(Gallery closed Spring Break, March 23 – April 1, 2013)
Axis Mundi: Levittown is a re-invented miniature neighborhood deconstructing the ideals and pitfalls of the famous post-World War II housing enclave for returning veterans. Levittown remains the quintessential American suburb.
Axis Mundi means the center of the world, the point where heaven connects to earth. Levittown, for its first (all white) inhabitants, offered reintegration into post-war America and entrance into the middle class. The post-war goal of suburban home ownership is still a central tenet of the American dream, our axis mundi. My focus in exploring suburbia through sculpture, sound, and moving images involves uncovering the sublimated aspects of life in these homes (as defined through privatization of property and family) and re-orienting the architecture of space, mind, and possibility that the suburban enclave presented. In observing these partially re-drawn lives, I hope viewers will bring their own previously forgotten or unarticulated memories into play and discover things about their own lives and relationships perhaps forgotten, left unarticulated, or never fully understood.
Artists Bios
HOLLY LAWS is interested in a multidisciplinary approach to making art. Her most recent body of work combines elements of theater and performance with object making to create immersive installations merging sound, projected images, controlled lighting and sculpture.
Laws’ work is in numerous private collections and was most recently included in exhibitions at Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts in New York, the University of Arkansas/Little Rock, and the Beard and Weil Galleries at Wheaton College in Norton MA.
Laws holds a BFA in Sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University, and an MFA in Sculpture from Tyler School of Art, Temple University. Laws currently teaches at the University of Central Arkansas.
CHARLOTTE MEEHAN is the Artistic Director of Sleeping Weazel, a Boston-based multimedia theatre company that also hosts monthly cyber art gallery exhibitions at www.sleepingweazel.com. She will premiere her new play, Real Realism, the third of a trilogy called The Problem with People, at Boston’s Factory Theatre in May 2013. Previous stage works have been developed and produced in New York at the Flea Theater, The Culture Project, Dixon Place, Blue Heron Arts Center, La MaMa ETC, and Pratt Institute, as well as in Bristol, UK at the Alma Theatre, among others.
Ms. Meehan is Playwright-in-Residence and Associate Professor of English at Wheaton College (MA). For more information on her stage works and their visual inspirations, please visitwww.charlottemeehan.com.