Housing Awareness at Wellfleet Galleries
The home group exhibit at Susie Nielsen’s Farm Projects in Wellfleet is intended to raise awareness of Cape Cod’s housing crisis. Thirteen artists will participate, showing pieces with themes of home, shelter, belonging, and safety.
The show runs from Aug. 20 to Sept. 5 with an opening reception on Saturday, Aug. 20 from 6 to 8 p.m.
Traci Harmon-Hay shows her 2022 “Floating House Series” at Wellfleet Preservation Hall through Aug. 31. The series was inspired by sea level rise and demolition. Harmon-Hay asks, what if our homes could hover, safe from natural and manmade disaster? A portion of the proceeds will benefit the Wellfleet Affordable Housing Trust.
Phyllis Ewen, Elise Kaufman, and Barbara Gordon will exhibit work from Sept. 8 through 29 at Wellfleet’s Off Main Gallery centered on Earth, home, and place. An affordable housing fundraiser will follow on the weekend of Oct. 1. —Eve Samaha
Fashion Show at the Commons
The Provincetown Commons, 46 Bradford St., will host a free fashion show in its front yard on Saturday, Aug. 20 from 6:45 to 9 p.m. The show, titled “Always a Bride, Never a Bridesmaid,” is a collection of designer Jimmy Lee’s work accompanied by musical performances and displays of visual works by local artists.
Chris Hartley, co-owner of the Provincetown Brewing Co., drag queens Todd Flaherty and Cody Sullivan, artists Paul Rizzo and Benji Weinryb Grohsgal, a few beloved bartenders, Emmy-nominated Murray Bartlett (famous for his role as the coked-out hotel manager on HBO’s The White Lotus), and state Sen. Julian Cyr are among those on the model list.
Musicians Qya Cristál and Hillarie Tamar will perform and Mark Adams, Donna Pomponio, and Maura Cunningham will be among the artists showing work. —Paul Sullivan
‘Music in the Studio’ Returns
Violinists Roseminna Watson and EmmaLee Holmes-Hicks will perform in the “Music in the Studio” series at 6 Swale Way in Truro on Thursday, Aug. 25. The two met while completing master’s degrees at SUNY Stony Brook but they didn’t play together until years later, when Watson moved to Providence, where they are members of a new-music ensemble, Verdant Vibes.
“We’re quite different,” says Watson. “But the energy we both bring to performing is similar.” They will play solos and duos.
“You don’t often hear a whole concert of violin duos,” Watson says. “Often, when you’re listening to them, it’s quite confusing. There’s so much overlap in sonority, exact range, and timbre, that sometimes you can’t tell who is playing what at what point in time.”
The conversation between two violins in a duo reflects the human psyche, says Watson. “It’s like mirroring two aspects of the same self,” she says.
The program includes a baroque duo by Jean-Marie Leclair; three Reinhold Gliére duos, which Watson says “sound Romantic — but with strange harmonies”; a solo piece by Kenji Bunch that Holmes-Hicks will perform; and Moonbeam Medicine Loop by Watson, which she describes as “otherworldly and sacred.”
Sergei Prokofiev’s Sonata for Two Violins, Op. 56, is the featured piece. The music moves from ethereal and placid to fiery and aggressive, to a third movement Watson calls a “memoryscape,” and a final movement that is joy laced with strife — a journey of emotion with no definite interpretation.
The Aug. 25 performance will take place in the studio of Watson’s aunt, the artist Cammie Watson, starting at 7:30 p.m. Tickets at eventbrite.com are $20 to $100. —Dorothea Samaha
Provincetown Dance Festival at Castle Hill
Edgewood Farm (3 Edgewood Way, Truro) will be the site of this year’s Provincetown Dance Festival on Aug. 19-20 and 26-27. All performances are at 7 p.m.; tickets are $30 at castlehill.org.
The festival covers a wide array of styles, including classical dancers from Boston Ballet. Rebecca McGowan and Jackie O’Riley represent Irish step dance. Tap is represented by Dramatix, classical Indian dance by Priya Bangal, and contemporary dance by Lilah Van Rens.
A highlight promises to be Sarah Haarmann, who will be performing Merce Cunningham’s Travelogue during the first weekend of the festival.
Cunningham, who died in 1992, was the romantic and artistic partner of composer John Cage. He also frequently collaborated with Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and Jasper Johns — all gay men who together formed a roving modern arts colony in New York City.
Like Cage, Cunningham was experimental beyond the pale. Rather than having pieces that were choreographed step by step, so that everything about the performance was predetermined, Cunningham relied on what he called “chance operations.”
Travelogue, originally performed in 1977, is Cunningham’s collaboration with Rauschenberg. In it, a dancer wearing nothing but body paint interacts with furniture and textiles to the Cage composition Telephone and Birds, a collage of recordings of bird songs and telephone calls. —Paul Sullivan
Jane Paradise at Alden Gallery
Jane Paradise has been photographing Provincetown’s dune shacks for over a decade. The results will be on display at Alden Gallery, 423 Commercial St., Provincetown starting Aug. 19, with a reception that evening from 7 to 9, and continuing until Sept. 1.
Paradise’s photographs convey the dreamy allure of the shacks, which have inspired countless artists, nature enthusiasts, and wanderers. Her pictures are unabashedly beautiful, celebrating the magical light pouring through the shacks and the expanses of sand, sky, and sea surrounding them.
In this series, Paradise seems equal parts photographer of nature and of architecture. Her perspective is always shifting, photographing the shacks from varying distances and from within, while also paying close attention to natural phenomena: a lurking fox or circular patterns in sand created by the wind. The cumulative effect conveys the shacks’ porous divisions between interior, domestic space and the landscape.
Paradise has arranged these photographs in a book to be published by Schiffer in October, Dune Shacks of Provincetown. A copy will be on view at the gallery. —Abraham Storer
Logan T. Sibrel at the Captain’s Daughters
Logan T. Sibrel presents a series of intimate ink drawings at the Captain’s Daughters (384 Commercial St., Provincetown) through Aug. 31, with an opening reception on Friday, Aug. 19 from 5 to 8 p.m. The images, typically indirect depictions of male figures and interior spaces, are sourced from photographs Sibrel takes while traveling. “I’m a terrible photographer, but I like turning bad photography into painting,” says Sibrel. “There’s something interesting in the transition.”
The drawings, all created in blue ink, reflect the awkward framing of bad photography. Sibrel isn’t intent on delivering the “money shot” of a face or expression, so important to figurative art. Here, the tight cropping flattens the image, turning Sibrel’s figures into compositional elements, often geometric shapes at play in pictures where bodies are just another part of an image, not hierarchically favored over things like house plants, the floor, or the negative space.
Sibrel, based in New York, has been working in the territory of queer figuration since his undergraduate years at Indiana University — a territory that has since become a source of fascination in the contemporary art world.
“It’s great to be part of this conversation, but you need to have a little bit of distance,” says Sibrel. “What is lost if you’re reducing things to this talking point? I’m happy to talk about identity issues,” he says, adding that he also likes to “nerd out” about painting.
While Sibrel works with images from his life, he complicates the sense of intimacy that the drawings suggest with his distanced, insistently formal perspective. Perhaps these are images of a lover, but we never see the face. The images convey a contrarian complexity, approaching depictions of the figure and domestic intimacy while also obscuring them.
Sibrel finds the word “intimacy” overused. Rather, in these works he reimagines the concept in emotionally cool terms (and colors), turning the personal into something approaching abstraction or resembling the discarded snapshots in a roll of film. —Abraham Storer
Topaz Winters at East End Books
New York City-based poet and performer Topaz Winters will read from and sign her new book, So, Stranger at East End Books Ptown on Thursday, Aug. 18 from 6 to 7 p.m. She will be joined by Danie Shokoohi, who writes fiction and poetry and is Winters’s editor.
So, Stranger, says Winters, is about “the American dream, the tension between being a daughter, being an artist, and being an immigrant. It’s about my dad, it’s about what we owe the places that we come from, departure and arrival, and occupying the space in between the immigrant narrative.”
Considering the current political climate, Winters believes “it’s important to hear voices of queer people of color, and people who don’t necessarily fit into the mainstream narrative.”
Winters is 22, the author of three poetry collections, and the founder and editor in chief at the independent publishing house and literary journal Half Mystic Press. Her list of “youngest to” accomplishments is impressive.
“There are people who don’t take me seriously,” she says. “But I’m at a point where I think of it with a sense of power and also a sense of privilege.” She’s grateful, she says, that she’s known what she wanted to do from a very young age — and she’s doing it. —Dorothea Samaha
