Beth Dary at The Front Room Gallery

Art Spiel Photo Story

The Front room Gallery hosts an online tour of “Aqua/Terra”, the beautiful and evocative solo exhibition of sculpture, installation, photograms, layered egg tempera and encaustic drawings by New York Artist, Beth Dary. The artworks in “Aqua/Terra” explore the power of water throughout natural forms and forces of nature, as a force to shape the land, sustain life, and destroy it. Beth Dary’s work also responds to the effect of human activity on land and water – bubbles of ancient carbon dioxide captured in Arctic ice, the rising tides due to the climate crisis, and fractal patterns formed by the liquid contaminants in urban runoff – in transition due to our culture’s impact on the environment.  

In her multi-panel installation, “Crue”, which literally means to flood, Beth Dary relates the flow and feeling of water through process and concept. These 28 panels evoke aerial images from flood zones that are the result of global warming. The fluid shapes in these works were created using a bath of water in which the surface was soaked and infiltrated with indigo dye and raw pigment.  

The works on paper entitled “Littoral Drift”, conceived with the notion that we are all connected through global waterways, are composed utilizing a process of layering egg tempera and encaustic drawings created from combined maps of waterscapes. 

“Emersion”, an installation of hand-built porcelain sculptures depicting marine barnacles, expresses the environmental concern for our oceans.  The visualization portrayed by Dary is one in which barnacles will increasingly occupy coastal areas as our actions warm the globe and waters begin to rise.

In the series “Caged” the glass sculptures are encased in woven steel wire, simultaneously protecting and entrapping the organic elements within. This was in part, a response to the caging of children on our Southern border, as well as a reflection on the fragility of life on an environmental, political, and personal level. Visually the wire adds an element of sculptural drawing on the glassworks, and as objects translated to photograms, the wire creates a linear texture which further defines the forms.

In “Flare”, her recent photogram collaboration with Anne Arden McDonald, Beth Dary utilizes the sculptures themselves to compose the forms in a camera-less photographic process, in which the glass sculptures are placed directly on the surface of light-sensitive paper, and then exposed to light. This results in a negative shadow image that captures the variations in tone due to the transparency of the hand-blown glass pieces. In creating the sculptural works, Dary selects specific facets and orbs from the sculptures and sandblasts them to reduce the transparency and reflectivity in certain areas of the glass objects. These variances translate into optically sensitive tones in the photograms, with the frosted glass refracting more light and the clear glass allowing more light to expose the image.

All photo courtesy of Kathleen Vance @Front Room Gallery

March 15th online exclusive with Front Room Gallery

March 20th, 4PM Virtual Walk Through with the artist