Shared Boundaries
Shared Boundaries at Metro Hall, Louisville, Kentucky, 2013.
With the art and artists I selected to exhibit in Metro Hall, I wanted to examine places in and around Louisville filtered through time. From specific landmarks in the various neighborhoods of the city, to the rural surrounding areas, Bette Levy, Martin Rollins, and Rachel Seed all give us a second look at our day-to-day surroundings.
Rachel Seed’s photos freeze the Portland neighborhood into a singular moment in time. Her attention to composition, to the color and textures of the area breathes new life into the old buildings and scenes that often go unnoticed as we travel from “point a” to “point b”.
Through simple manipulation of colored oil pastels, Martin Rollins captures a real sense of precise moments of time in the neighborhoods of his drawings. You know when you see each work the exact time of day, the temperature, the humidity, the feel, and smells of each area depicted, the Highlands, Clifton, Crescent Hill, Germantown, and St. Matthews. His drawings don’t just reproduce the appearance of our city – they provoke emotional understanding of the community.
Bette Levy’s use of old farm tools and hand knitted embellishments reminds us of the importance of heritage, relationships and craft often associated with the rural life found further out in Jefferson County and beyond. Levy’s artwork elegantly expresses both her family’s personal history and the history of families all around the Metro area.
The works by these artists all tell a story. They tell stories about Louisville, they tell stories about who we are, where we work, and where we live. They tell us about our shared histories and our shared boundaries.
