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The Chazan Gallery at Wheeler is pleased to present Traces and Transitions, a two-person exhibition, featuring the work of Henry Ferreira and Julia Shepley from January 29 to March 3, 2026.
There is a lot that connects Julia Shepley and Henry Ferreira’s work. Both share a fascination with the layered process of image-making. Their practices intersect through a deep commitment to craft, where drawing, printmaking, transparency and experimentation serve as means to explore the creative process.
In Henry Ferreira's words: “respect for craft has been at the center of my studio practice and teaching. Knowing how to make it is the first step. Acquired skills need to be practiced and absorbed. The idea comes next. The medium and methods learned and mastered become a means for exploration to execute content-driven pieces. The intertwining of content and form is what grows the work, and new ground is broken. It doesn’t always happen, but when it does, it helps make sense of the making. I have used various methods of manipulating the image, from analog photography to digital and drawing. Usually, ending in a print, most likely in screen print. Briars, twigs, vines, and small branches appear in my work quite often. Their first appearance occurred a few years after graduate school. (..) Those old sticks and branches stuck. The work I’m doing presently is based on the dense underbrush, thickets, overgrown vines, and briars. I see this overgrowth as a place to start a drawing and a murky metaphor. I look for the most tangled places that might serve as a starting point. In the studio, I review the photos looking for an image I can live with for a while. I do a drawing on film in black and white, somewhat based on the photo, both simplifying and complicating it. I use the drawing to produce screen stencils. I build the print from light to dark by overprinting the stencils in transparent layers, starting with the lightest and working to the darkest. It’s been nice drawing more, depending a little less on manipulating the image through a digital method. (...) Exploring what surrounds me; where I live, what I walk through, and allowing how it’s made to play a role in seeing it anew.”
Henry Ferreira received his MFA from RISD in printmaking in 1980 and returned the following year to teach. He is head of the Printmaking Department and President of RISD’s Faculty Association/Union. He was a member of the inaugural class at Bristol Community College in Fall River, MA, and earned his BFA in 1972 from Southeastern Massachusetts University, now the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. He was head of the Printmaking Department for many years and President of RISD’s Faculty Association/Union for ten years. Ferreira taught for 45 years before retiring in 2024.
At the Chazan Gallery, Julia Shepley is presenting a new series of photographs that “are captured from the translucent surfaces of handmade sculptural shadow boxes. Inside the shadow boxes are changing arrangements of shadow puppet-like elements made from drawings, wood structures, mirrors and colored lights to create various surface images to photograph. The shadow images appear to be traveling through atmospheric space and serve as a personal iconography; a visual translation of her experiences of layered time, dreams, turmoil, and the resilience of connection. Changing the set ups allows me an exciting way to create photographic images from sculptural means. This modality is an authentic extension of my ongoing experimentation with materials, drawing, structure, light, and perspective to evoke a sense of motion and transience. Each image projected on the surface screen only exists for the moment it is captured by the camera, before the elements behind are changed to alter the image.”
Julia Shepley’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in galleries and museums, and is in numerous public and private collections. Her exhibitions include Boston Sculptors Gallery, Boston MA; Trustman Gallery: Simmons University, Boston, MA; MEWO Kunsthalle, Memmingen, Germany; The Sculpture Center, Cleveland, Ohio; the deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln MA; Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham, MA; the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA (“Contemporary Sculpture and Sculptors’ Drawings”). She has held residencies including Goetemann Residency at Ocean Alliance, Gloucester, MA; Zea Mays Printmaking, Florence, MA; Scuola Internazionale di Grafica di Venezia and Venice, Italy; and Penland School of Craft, NC. She has been awarded grants from the New England Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Julia Shepley studied at Boston University and works out of her studio in the Brickbottom Artists Building in Somerville, MA.