This Must Be The Place
Colleen Kiely + Margaret Nomentana
Colleen Kiely, And the Days Go By #1
March 24 - May 7, 2022
About The Show
As part of our Women’s History Month programming, Cove Street Arts is excited to present This Must Be The Place, an exhibition featuring feminist-based paintings, drawings and collages by Colleen Kiely and Margaret Nomentana.
The exhibition’s title reflects a sense of cultural dislocation resulting from the last two years, and references the Talking Heads’ song This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody) from the 1982 album, Speaking in Tongues. This theme of disjunction is embodied in both artist’s work, though it plays out differently in each case.
Colleen Kiely’s enigmatic portraits of imagined female subjects appear almost ghostly at times. The oil and acrylic paintings on wood panels depict women in varying states of visibility, embodying vulnerability and states of transformation. As critic Cate McQuaid recently observed in the Boston Globe, Kiely’s work represents the fleeting nature of identity.
In contrast to Kiely’s understated figurations, painter and collage artist Margaret Nomentana’s lively abstractions are composed with graphic shapes which arts writers describe as vibrant. Her manipulated paint collaged into non-objective constellations of shapes reference music, landscape, and various states of emotion. They exist as locative and non-locative at once.
Both women share similar approaches to art-making and craft. Each artist describes her work as process-driven, and actively plays with figure/ground relationships, formally and metaphorically. Nomentana’s works on paper are literally collaged, while Kiely’s paintings featuring women constructed from composite sources can be regarded as a type of conceptual collage.
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