‘Shop Rats’ exhibit at Northfield Mount Hermon highlights ‘physicality’ of faculty’s art

From porcelain pillows to “whirlpools” of layered paint, the pieces in Northfield Mount Hermon’s annual faculty exhibit, “Shop Rats,” may appear as separate stories, but share a similarity: they are handmade. In an era of digital prompts and automated efficiency, these artists are using their bodies to filter ideas, proving that the most profound stories are still told through the movement of a wrist or the dance with a printing press.

“We filter ideas through our bodies — it’s not just a mental process, it’s actually a physical process,” Stephen Allison said during the exhibit’s opening reception on Feb. 13.

In the first of Allison’s five prints, his daughter dances behind the fuchsia words, “This machine moves.” His son smiles with his bike in the next, peering through the first orange “H” in “This machine frees.” An anatomical heart, inspired by medical illustrations, beats in the third print, the red letters of “This machine stirs,” appearing in blood red.

The text twists the famous words from folk phenom Woody Guthrie’s guitar, “This machine kills fascists,” the starting point for Allison’s collection as he considered the explosion of artificial intelligence (AI) and “[riffed] on the idea of, ‘What is a machine? Where are we putting our attention? Are we willing to give over our humanity?’… Are we willing to give that up for the sake of efficiency or ease?”

Instead of typing a prompt into an AI chatbot, Allison carved linoleum prints with meticulous care for about six hours to create the images and words of his prints.

“You do this dance with the machine of the press,” he explained. “There’s a hand in them, there’s faults, they’re imperfect, they’re not machine-made, these are entirely handmade.”

No matter their preferred mediums, artists at the opening reception described a fundamental “physicality” in the art hanging next to their names.

David DiRocco crafted a couple and their dog canoeing across a moose antler that his dog fetched from the forest. The artist burnt each line of the lake’s waves with a woodburning pen through a form of art called “pyrography.”

“The movement of the wrist changes how the heat disperses,” DiRocco said. “It’s so physical, and so it transforms the material.”

Jamie Rourke’s work spanned materials and media, from figurative clay sculptures to drawings with snake skins stuck to the paper and sculptures of “altered life forms.” At the end of his lineup, a tangle of coiled wires glimmered with “polychromatic spectral paint.” The piece, which resembles a huge disco hairball, is titled, “Gone Midnight.”

“It has a certain anxiety to it which I like — that energy just feels very much of the time right now, and I wanted to just make it feel exciting.”

The idea struck Rourke while driving. Through the window he spotted a few cardboard boxes on the side of the road.

“These wires were just spilling everywhere, and usually if I see a group of things for free, I stop and take them, because if it’s one chair, you’re probably just going to use it as a chair, but if it’s six chairs, you can take those apart and you can probably make something with all those parts.”

Late at night, Rourke twisted the wires together without any glue. At the opening reception, he spun one wire out from the tangle to show the process.

“Even though there’s a chaos to it, there’s also a logic,” Rourke claimed. “The form looks like it’s a singular solid form, but if you shook it, it would just fall apart.”

As for how many wires make up the ball of anxiety, Rourke was unsure.

“It’s like jelly beans in a jar,” he said, grinning.

Beside Rourke’s wild work, Clara Cruz’s paintings cover the white walls with simultaneously bold and weathered colors. In one, a mother clutches her child to her chest, the focal point of the exhibit as the only work hanging on the wall facing visitors when they walk in.

Cruz described her process as “the layering of stories.” For the exhibit paintings, she layered the stories of “La Llorona,” a ghost from Mexican folklore, the migration of Mexicans into the United States, travel along the Connecticut River and motherhood.

“The story of La Llorona has pretty much migrated anywhere Mexican people have migrated in this country, and the story changes as it goes. It’s originally a story about family, about colonization, about loss, about rage, about all of these different things, but I feel like it keeps transmuting, and that appeared in my work on a personal level,” Cruz said, her toddler listening on her hip.

Since painting the pieces two years ago, Cruz said the meaning they emanate has shifted with time.

“Now, when I think about La Llorona in this political moment in the world in political history, the significance is so much greater, and I can’t think about that story without thinking of moms having their kids stolen by ICE,” Cruz said, referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “It feels really different to show it in this moment than it did to show it two years ago.”

Cruz painted the works while earning her graduate degree in New York City before she started teaching at Northfield Mount Hermon. She recalled looking at blank canvases, waiting for inspiration. When it refused to arrive, she dropped the canvas on the floor and soaked it in “whirlpools” of paint with mops and brooms, “thinking of it as a floor or a literal ground to start on,” she said.

As she added layers and scraped them away, narratives emerged.

“There is a lot of physicality in the way that I work, but it doesn’t always appear as the immediate thing that it’s about; it’s part of the underlying story,” Cruz explained. “It feels both really intense and in some ways violent, but it’s also this deep touch which feels like it’s about memory, and it’s about caring in its own way.”

“Shop Rats” will run until March 6. Visits can be arranged by appointment with Gallery Coordinator Mona Seno at mseno@nmhschool.org.