Our Guest Juror: Gretchen Sinnett

Gretchen Sinnett is an Associate Professor of Art History and former Chair in the Art + Design department at Salem State University. Her courses explore how art and visual culture both reflect and help shape the societies from which they emerge. She believes that close looking and visual analysis benefit students in all disciplines and especially enjoys teaching courses that draw students from across the university. Her scholarship focuses on representations of girlhood and adolescence in 19th-century American art. She lives in Melrose with her husband and son, who just graduated from college, plus two bossy Siamese cats.

Reunion at Charter St Cemetery – Russell Finley

I loved the way this artwork suggested history as a palimpsest - layers of experience that initially seem lost but flicker below the surface, activating the present. The assertive incising and the spectral quality of the black and white figures, which gradually emerge the longer we gaze, imply that we can conjure the past if we just look beyond our intense focus on the present. The cerulean sky and glimpses of purple, green, and hot pink below the surface contribute to the picture’s otherworldly quality.

Gretchen Sinnett

There Was Something "Familiar" In the Old Witch's Boot

– Charles Lang

This painting, with its drips and splatters of paint suggesting the corner of a painter’s studio, made me think of art as a form of conjuring. Like Vincent Van Gogh’s depictions of shoes, the image seems to trouble the boundary between the animate and inanimate. Naturalistic yet whimsical, that boot has as much personality as the mesmerizing cat. If I turn my back on the canvas, will I find that the boot has sneakily propelled itself forward with its little passenger?

Gretchen Sinnett

Conjuring Beauty – Dr. Eleanor Ruth Fisher

The glint in the glass eye, evocative of a fortune teller’s crystal ball, initially caught and held my attention. Do the beautiful glass shards through which the figure stares represent an elegant if mundane cowl or an undulating portal into another realm? The curving locks of hair, swirling shards of glass, and mottled gold and green background evoke a generative, but potentially disruptive, energy. Once you stare into that crystalline gaze will you be able to pull yourself away or will you be drawn into the vortex?

Gretchen Sinnett

What is Found by MJ Bujold

Healing Hands by JS Murdock

The Secret Memories of Trees by Chris Mailler

Custom House by Bobbie Bush