Grace DeGennaro • Michelle Grabner
Julie Levesque • Anna Von Mertens
January 11 – March 8, 2025
Opening Reception:
Saturday, January 11, 3 – 5pm
Drive-by Projects is pleased to begin the new year with Wheel of the Year: Winter, an exhibition of paintings by Michelle Grabner, drawings by Anna Von Mertens, works on paper by Grace DeGennaro, and sculpture by Julie Levesque.
The concept of “the wheel of the year” refers to practice of using an annual calendar/map to mark the year’s solar events. While it honors ancient historical roots, it is not a direct continuation of any particular tradition. Much like an almanac or seasonal map, Wheel of the Year: Winter acknowledges the ever-continuing, cyclical events of the year with a focus on winter and the return of light.
The concept of “the wheel of the year” refers to the practice of using an annual calendar/map to mark the year’s solar events. While it honors ancient historical roots, it is not a direct continuation of any particular tradition. Much like an almanac or seasonal map, Wheel of the Year: Winter acknowledges the ever-continuing, cyclical events of the year with a focus on winter and the return of light.
Winter is a time for revisiting handiwork. Responding to the excessively ornate patterns and symmetries that constitute lace, doilies, and other forms of domestic handiwork, Michelle Grabner copies and rearticulates these clichéd patterns in an attempt to rearrange the hierarchies inherent in the cultural signifiers of class, craft, aesthetics, and abstraction. Grabner’s two Untitled works appear humble and straightforward at first glance. Given time and seeing, their milky, woven surfaces reveal a depth of color in their overlapping threads and complex surface texture that is an apt metaphor for the warp and weft of ordinary life.
“The ancient rosette image symbolizes the duality of heavenly perfection and earthly passion.”
Grace DeGennaro’s mandala-like works employ a vocabulary of archetypal images to transcend religion and culture. Her Rosette Series of watercolor drawings depicts a geometric rose formed through the overlapping of seven transparent circles symbolizing a balance of Eastern and Western thought, ritual, and the passage of time. The icy colorways of Rosette 8 and the moon cycle of Rosette 9 are clear visualizations of Wheel of the Year: Winter.
Anna Von Mertens’s drawing series Polaris Portraits was created in conjunction with the writing of her recently published Attention is Discovery:The Life and Legacy of Astronomer Henrietta Leavitt (MIT Press 2024). The book celebrates Leavitt’s discovery in 1912 of the foundational period-luminosity relation in Cepheid variables, the natural law that enabled astronomers to measure the distance to faraway stars for the first time. Von Mertens’s drawings are based on magnified details of Polaris, the North Star, that appeared on photographic glass plates which Leavitt notated in ink. These drawings pay tribute to a life spent looking and to the ongoing quest to understand our place in time and the universe.
Julie Levesque celebrates the absence of color. Despite working almost exclusively in white, Levesque’s work is rich in content.
“The absence of color for me represents the blanching of memory, purity, sacredness and winter with all its snow, ice and salt. My work is a world of white that shifts delicately from tenuous balance to a longing for spacious calm.”
Using diverse and often unexpected materials (glass, brass, powdered aspirin, bronze), her elegant sculptures, installed in Drive-by’s storefront windows, welcome viewers to Wheel of the Year: Winter.
