The Chazan Gallery at Wheeler presents Mo Kelman’s solo show, Water Ways, on view from November 21 to December 17, 2024.  

 

Kelman’s sculptures merge abstracted images of water in its various forms -- rivers, lakes, clouds and ice – with industrial and architectural structures.  Favoring simple, malleable materials that allow her to invent construction methods, Kelman crafts “skins” by resist-dyeing silk or netting cordage, integrating them with skeletal frameworks of bamboo, wood or wire. The Water Ways series is rooted in Kelman’s years growing up in Cleveland, Ohio.  The artist notes, “These were the glory days of the steel factories that lined the banks of the Cuyahoga River.  I loved the landscape of skeleton towers and massive steel bridges—railroad bridges, lift bridges, swing bridges.  And there were strings of monster power poles, shrinking toward the vanishing point.  They were bare bones structures……they revealed everything about their engineering.”  Kelman adds, “In the summer of 1969, I turned 17, and the Cuyahoga River caught fire—an unlikely intersection of industry and water.  And for me, a profound challenge to my love of both the industrial landscape and the world of nature.”

The artist sees water as the ideal subject to contemplate the laws that govern nature as it ceaselessly advances and embarrasses our every effort to keep it at bay.  Kelman adds, “The natural world is forever transforming and adaptable. My artwork contemplates and celebrates nature’s relentless power, and compares it with a built world that inevitably gives way.”

Mo Kelman was awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, and has shown her artwork in more than 100 exhibitions across the US, Europe, Japan and Korea.

Exhibitions include Boston Sculptors Gallery (solo) and the Boston Federal Reserve Art Gallery; Chazan Gallery (solo), Newport Art Museum, Brown University and Providence College (solo) in Rhode Island; Westbeth Gallery, 1155 Avenue of the Americas Gallery and Narthex Gallery in New York; the Silk Weaving Studio (solo) in Vancouver; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the British Crafts Center in London; the International Shibori Symposia in Nagoya, Japan and Hong Kong; the International Textile Symposium in Kyoto, Japan; and the Cheongju International Craft Biennale and Heyri Art Factory in South Korea.  

Kelman is professor emeritus of art at the Community College of Rhode Island and has taught classes and workshops internationally.  She received her MFA from the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth and lives in Providence, RI.