On Thursday, January 11, at 6 pm, join Christopher Volpe for an artist talk, reading, and book signing about his current exhibition, Loomings.

Volpe relocated from his native Long Island to earn a master’s degree in poetry from the University of New Hampshire. He turned from literature to painting during a stint teaching college art history and quickly made visual art his central pursuit.

“As a painting medium, tar magnifies painting’s basic challenge: to transform the material into the immaterial,” Volpe says. “Can I wrench and charm this poisonous muck into something meaningful, even something beautiful and poetic?”

Titled with quotes from Moby-Dick, the paintings suggest parallels between the fate of Ahab’s doomed whaling ship, the Pequod, and the world’s stubborn pursuit of fossil fuel energy at all costs.

“Melville created art in the mid-1800s that raises profound questions about the story of humanity itself and still serves as a devastating critique of the nation we’ve made,” Volpe says. “Melville had a very modern sense of human folly. I hope Loomings invokes Moby-Dick as a evocation of the limits of human knowledge as well as a cautionary, foundational myth for our own age of accelerating climate change and social disruption.”