Phyllis Ewen: Deep Time

October 3-28, 2018
Opening Reception: Friday, October 5, 2018, 5:00-8:00 pm
Second Saturday BADA Event: October 13, 2018, 2:00-4:00 pm, Art in the Age of the Anthropocene: a Boston Art Dealers Association panel discussion Moderated by Sam Toabe, Gallery Director at UMass Boston's University Hall Gallery.

Guest artist Phyllis Ewen presents Deep Time, mixed-media works inspired by the movement of the earth's surface. With scanned and altered sections of ocean floor maps, Ewen delves into the science of anthropogenic climate change and its effect on land and water. Her palette comes from the deep ocean mountains, valleys, and canyons of the ocean floor. During the process of creating this thought provoking body of work, Ewen's chroma darkened, reflecting the collective mood of increasing global ecological dangers. Melting glaciers and warming seas have affected the sea floor, disrupting evolutionary Deep Time with the significant human impact on the earth's geology and ecosystems. To create this work Ewen digitally modifies cartographic images of ocean floor maps plotted in the 1950s and 1960s by geologist Marie Tharp. Fragmenting and reassembling her source material, Ewen adds paint to form an imagined dimensional underwater topography. The depth and texture in these works are both illusion and reality. Magnetically attached layers reference the magnetic anomalies of the earth's tectonic plates on the ocean floor.