in place of pleasing - 5 Artists in Conversation with Diana Stoll
Wednesday October 21st, 7pm (EST)

***All events are open to everyone - we have a suggested $5 - $20 pay what you can option, as well as free.***


(Artists from left to right: Joyce Thornburg, Denise Carbonell, Helen Robinson, and Molly Sawyer (standing with Nava Lubelski's paintings)

Join us for insightful discussion with the five artists of the RAMP Gallery exhibition of "in place of pleasing" moderated by the writer Diana Stoll with Colby Caldwell.
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Tomorrow, maybe
(a correspondence)

"Dear Diana, Some days I don’t drive into the storm. Some days the storm feels much too powerful for one psyche to handle. I pull to the side of the road: there’s a little house. (Always those widowed clapboard houses on the sides of highways, dropped from the sky.) I bang on the door. The storm is coming. The sky is falling. Anyone home? A friend? A friendly stranger? No, no one’s here, today. Today: just reaching this clean empty porch feels like an act of recovery. And peering into this shelter helps settle the nerves. . .

Dear Elaine, . . . I like this picture of you looking through a window—curious, interested, but not invasive. Allowing things to appear and unfold in whatever way they do. I’ve said it before: you are an efficient thinker! I envy that. I tend to bring my overpacked pocketbook along wherever I go, and proceed to empty it out on the table before allowing myself to begin thinking: keys, wallet, comb; gripes, biases, history. I have some things to learn from you, and from these five artists: start clean, let things happen. Leave the purse in the car."

Excerpts from the correspondence written for "in place of pleasing"
(find the full correspondence at www.revolveavl.org)
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Poet Elaine Bleakney and critic Diana Stoll were invited to find a way to respond to the artists’ work in words, and to consider what it means to create art and bring it out to the world at this fraught moment. Over the course of a week after visiting each of the studios, the two writers exchanged daily emails about what they had seen and what they were thinking about.