Soft Shoulder Curatorial Walk & Talk

Join curator Cathleen Daley, as well as exhibiting artists Ed Christie, Hilde-Kari Guttormsen, Samantha Fields, Jason Rohlf for an informal and interactive conversation of our January 2020 exhibit, Soft Shoulder.

Soft Shoulder is an invited curatorial exhibit curated by Cathleen Daley (Co-Founder/Director of Room 83 Spring). As a companion to Soft Shoulder, Cathleen has also juried Broken Beauty, an exhibit of Cambridge Art Association Member work presented at CAA’s University Place Gallery.

About Soft Shoulder | Organic, unstructured, and non-conforming, Soft Shoulders artists present a flexible address of surface and structure. Engaged in informal and off-kilter strategies, the non-representational works are relational and familiar. Ambiguous and consciously awkward, the work derails notions of finished, fixed or known, on purpose — always a little off-road, yet en route. Like the unpaved patch of dirt along side the highway where macadam meets gravel loose and soft and the traveller slows to a stop, Soft Shoulders posits the state of in-between, at the interchange of becoming and spent with an emphasis on sensate materiality.

Common to all, is a prioritized sense of touch, which lends an empathic and anthropomorphized read to the work through palpably made processes. In each, a sense of presence is evoked, a posture assumed, a manner of being evoked. Draped, stuffed, slumped, or stacked, the action is performative and humorous in a forlorn sort of way. From socks to stones, shop rags to tarps, Soft Shoulders artists are invested in an expanded range of hybrid craft, fiber, painterly, and sculptural practices combining traditional and everyday materials to ends fearless, vulnerable, and decidedly human. 

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