The Ely Center of Contemporary Art is pleased to present A Desire Path, inspired by the unplanned trails that humans create despite extensive planning. This group exhibition features the works of Jessica Bottalico, Annie Ewaskio, Jessica Fallis and Sydney Kleinrock. Each artist navigates their practice similarly to such a structure, finding moments in natural settings to get to their destinations; planned or unplanned, cyclical or straight. Please join us for the opening reception on Sunday, March 9, 1-3 pm.

“Our planet holds knowledge in its physicality: the past, the present, and the future of a landscape hum in simultaneous presence. The landscape overwhelms our limited senses like a drug, placing a distorting lens between our awareness and reality. What I find, in the natural world, is a psychedelic density—a wealth of information seen and unseen.” -Ewaskio

“For much of my life, I viewed my own body as a similarly non-functional vessel. Then, just weeks after starting this series, I learned I was pregnant. My work evolved from two-dimensional drawings into sculptural forms, driven by an obsession with creating vessels that reflected my ever-changing body—and, more recently, my ever-expanding roles as a woman, wife, mother, educator, and artist.”-Bottalico

“As a native of New England, I was fascinated by the quality of color and light of the West Coast. To step into that [Muir Woods]  forest was to experience the sublime and a deep inner peace; these paintings became a way for me to revisit that feeling.” -Fallis

“I use the fragmented nature of the quilted material to queer time through non-linear storytelling, often drawing on stills from life, memory, and imagination. The sections, when viewed as a whole, simultaneously depict moments of growth and decay, chaos and calm—weaving together a picture that evokes our entangled influence on nature through the cyclical passage of time.” -Kleinrock.