Melissa Thorne’s exhibition “Bright Passage: An Illuminated Interior” opens September 8th, 2024
For this exhibition at the Hancock Shaker Village, the artist Melissa Thorne, Assistant Professor of Studio Art at the University at Albany, brings together two bodies of work that highlight the relationship between the barn interior and its physical thresholds: doors, windows and stairwells.
In a series of twelve drawings, Thorne pairs representational barn images with abstract patterns derived from Shaker chair weaving. Emphasizing the apertures in the barn interior, she renders colored light to reference altered perception, as well as the Shaker history of direct mystical vision. Using a color palette derived from local wildflowers, she makes a connection between two methods of drawing, and two types of repetitive labor – agricultural and textile – and proposes a metaphoric reading of both interiority and illumination.
Continuing the reference to colored light as sacred, metaphysical, or otherworldly, the artist has also created three site-specific stained-glass windows. Building on the pattern language of the drawings, the windows use a selection of glass colors that refer to the land and plants experienced by Hancock Shakers; apple blossoms, milkweed, and goldenrod. While the drawings exist as finished representations, the windows filter exterior light and respond to changing conditions, actively casting their colored impression on the interior space.
The benches in the exhibition offer a place for quiet contemplation and reference the seating of a chapel. While Shakers did not ornament their worship spaces with stained glass, this exhibition offers the workspace of the barn as a potential site of devotion and reflection, a nod to the Shaker ethos of labor as spiritually virtuous.
In creating the windows for this installation, Thorne worked with Trevor Wilson, an artist and glass fabricator at Trevor Wilson Studio in South Kortright, New York.
September 8 - 25, 2024
October 1 - November 30, 2024
Closed September 26 to 30
Hancock Shaker Village / GPS Driving Address: 34 Lebanon Mountain Road, Hancock, MA 01237.
Visit the Hancock Shaker Village website for daily/seasonal open hours and directions