A Turn Toward the Domestic:

Escapism and nostalgia run through the FAWC fellows’ group show at PAAM

BY EMMA FIONA JONES

It is rare that a group show united by happenstance rather than a conceptual core is more than the sum of its parts. But at an exhibition of work by this year’s Fine Arts Work Center visual art fellows at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, a sense of uprootedness and longing for the familiar thread through the work.

The show reveals shared preoccupations and instincts among the 10 artists, manifested in patterns and textures repeated across the gallery: sundry escapist desires, a proclivity for craft, and a strain of cautious nostalgia.

In a back corner of the gallery is Lacey Black’s altar-like arrangement of hand-beaded objects and miniature paintings, reminiscent of offerings a child might leave for a forest-dwelling spirit. To the left of this configuration is an acrylic-on-panel work titled Fairy Pools. An upside-down tree floats within a watery bubble on the left side of the composition, five figures lounge on a branch, and beyond them, in a parallel universe, a lion and a bull watch a city about to be swallowed by a looming wave.

Abigail Dudley picks up this mystical thread in her oil on aluminum paintingSummer Nights. In it, three figures and a butterfly-shaped balloon linger around a table in the viridian dusk.

As if to break the magical spells of these works, a patchy chorus of flat acoustic notes abruptly barges into the polite silence of the paintings. ForPiano Sketch No. 1, Tess Oldfield, a sound artist, designed a prosthetic for a piano hidden in plain sight in the far corner of the gallery. The work produces bursts of song at regular intervals by way of motors attached to the piano’s strings.

Still, the lilac-laced green that hovers over Summer Nights seems to be picked up in the background of Calhan Hale’s painting Flush diagonally across from it, where bundles of firewood wrapped in butter-hued gauze are stacked within a close-cropped frame. As if to contradict its cozy content, Flush’s brash yellows and orange-reds recall the paradox of chile-spiced pineapple from a New York City street cart.

The honeycomb pattern of the stacked ends of the logs in Flush reverberate in a willowy, ghostlike installation to its right. Made of latex, tree bark, and stone remnants, Carlie Trosclair’s Confluence is tacked tenuously to the wall. From a distance, the work bears a familial resemblance to the latex forms of Eva Hesse; at close range, it takes on the wispy quality of a brittle scrap of old lace.

Nick Fagan’s tapestries are similarly tattered. Drawing on labor history and his own experience working as a mover, his tapestry High Fructose unravels the fragile masculinity that infuses his materials, with its evenly spaced stitches in spring-hued yarn mending rips and tears marring a mud-colored moving blanket.

Fraying yarn and faded flaxen hues carry over into second-year fellow Anne Clare Rogers’s Mother. Perched on a plinth several feet from High Fructose, the torso-like form composed of paper pulp, basket reed, yarn, and other materials evokes a body torn open and then painstakingly spliced back together.

This maternal evocation is reiterated in a womblike form sheathed in olive-green, resin-coated leather protruding from the wall. Yacine Tilala Fall’sDouble Bind seems more the aftermath of a performance than an object unto itself: porcupine quills and a pair of forceps jut out from a cavity amid crumpled folds, and the form’s jagged edges suggest it has been ripped away from a greater whole.

Dominique Muñoz’s installation of three works takes up its own wall, a necessity given its density. Figures fade into rippling textiles in framed photographs mounted over a long swath of royal-hued fabric. There is a sense of the theatrical here, and at the same time the protection of privacy comes to mind as the multimedia layers seem to deflect the harsh gaze of the cameras that at some point in the past captured the images.

The intensity of Muñoz’s color fields gives way to a field of a different sort on the adjacent wall. That’s where Michael Waugh’s seemingly straightforward line drawing of a dog and a swarm of locusts beneath a swath of swaying reeds is installed. On closer inspection, the drawing is composed of thousands of hand-written words rendered in scrawling black ink. Waugh’s work draws from disparate sources, in this case President Barack Obama’s 2011 jobs bill.

Among the fantasy worlds and shards of history, Waugh’s drawings are the works most openly laden with political satire. Maybe they also explain something about the near coherence of the FAWC fellows’ works on view together here.

There is something greater than studio proximity that seems to have seeped into the psyches of these artists who have come to call Provincetown home for the winter. Maybe it’s just the ocean air or drag karaoke. But there’s evidence it’s something more profound. Behind many of these pieces, the viewer senses deep research into nondominant histories. And a longing for retreat from a society’s headlong hurtle toward fascism is palpable. The skeins of yarn and scenes of home that proliferate in these works disclose a turn toward the domestic that is hard to deny.

The event: FAWC visual art fellows group show
The time: Thursday to Sunday, noon to 5 p.m., through March 8
The place: Provincetown Art Association and Museum, 460 Commercial St.
The cost: $15 general admission

source: https://provincetownindependent.org/arts-minds/2026/02/04/a-turn-toward-the-domestic/