RACHEL RICKERT, Before Him, 2017, oil paint on canvas, 48 in x 60 in
Selections from the Collection of Rod Burks
VESTIGES
November 1 - 27, 2024
The Common Well is pleased to present VESTIGES — Selections from the Collection of Rod Burks in the main gallery with works by Colleen Barry, Hernan Bas, Charles Gill, Keiran Brennan Hinton, Jocelyn Hobbie, Benjamin Jones, Rebecca Ness and Rachel Rickert. We are so grateful to be able to share these incredible paintings and drawings with our community. Thank you, Rod!
And in the second floor alcove, we have INTO THE ETHER, an exquisite pop-up exhibition of new works by Camilla Dahlin.
Both exhibitions are open Mondays - Fridays , 9AM - 5PM or by appointment through November 27, 2024.
CAMILLA DAHLIN, Kheiron, 2024, handmade oil paint on canvas, 11 x 11 in, The Common Well
UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS
BENNY MERRIS, An Other Another 261, 2024, digital print on translucent acrylic, 60 in x 120 in
IN LOVE WITH THE WORLD
BENNY MERRIS
GALLERY EXHIBITION: December 5, 2024 - January 31, 2025
LIGHTED INSTALLATION: December 5, 2024 - November 30, 2025
OPENING RECEPTION WITH MUSIC BY GRANT OLSEN: December 5 • 6:00 - 8:00PM
ARTIST TALK: December 12 • 6:00PM
As part of our expanding Art Program, The Common Well is welcoming home New York-based artist Benny Merris for a solo exhibition and the lighting of new public artwork. Merris is the inaugural artist for this site-specific project in an existing, vintage, fluorescent sign outside our building, along with a solo exhibition inside the gallery. Coinciding with Winter Solstice, IN LOVE WITH THE WORLD, comes to life this December at The Common Well featuring photographs from Merris' ongoing series, An Other Another, in which he paints and then photographs his forearm during exploratory play in varied landscapes. Merris describes his work as “situated between painting and performance documentation — while my work is grounded in histories of abstraction, the series revels in an ambivalence towards painting-as-object by experimenting with ephemerality and embodied movement. The temporary arm paintings underscore the idea that abstraction is embedded in the world around us, asking us to reimagine our assumptions about humans, creativity, and the environment.”
IN LOVE WITH THE WORLD includes photographs Merris made this past summer in the Boise foothills, Boise River, Payette Lake in McCall and in Lost River Range, Idaho, during the 2017 total eclipse. Merris, who is based out of Brooklyn, New York, often uses an iphone to take his photographs and has long considered the iphone a lightbox. Not only does this exhibition mark his first solo show in his home state of Idaho, but it’s the first time he’s had his images turned into transparencies and displayed in a giant light box. The 2-story, former Culligan sign, is a lighted box that illuminates at night via a photocell making it visible from the adjacent highway where passersby can also see the Boise foothills in the distance. This exciting exhibition officially opens on December 5, 2024. The gallery portion will close on January 31, 2025, but the outdoor light box installation will remain up until December 2025 when it is replaced with the work of our next featured artist.
Merris has had solo exhibitions at The Bernstein Gallery at Princeton University, Princeton; Heroes Gallery, NYC; Cleopatra’s, Brooklyn; Jeff Bailey Gallery, Hudson; Nina Johnson, Miami; Battat Galerie, Montreal; Cokkie Snoei, Rotterdam; Glasgow Project Room, Glasgow; and Kunsthal Rotterdam. Merris has participated in numerous group exhibitions including presentations at Ballroom Marfa in Texas; ODDKIN, Providence; Nathalie Karg Gallery, NYC; O’Flaherty’s, NYC; Topps Gallery, Memphis; KMN Projects, Providence; The American Academy of Arts and Letters, NYC; GRIMM Gallery, NYC; Essex Flowers, NYC; Murray Guy, NYC; Regina Rex, NYC; LAXART, Los Angeles; Contemporary Art Museum Houston, Houston; Boston University Art Gallery, Boston; and the Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff. Merris has been commissioned to make murals in cities including Hudson, Miami and New York. He received a BA from University of Massachusetts Boston and MFA from Glasgow School of Art and was a member of the inaugural Paint School cohort run by Shandaken Projects in New York City. Merris has been an artist-in-residence at Casa de los Artistas, Costa Rica; The Banff Centre, Alberta; Denniston Hill, Catskills, New York; and Offshore Residency, Greece.
Click here to request a preview or to schedule a tour of the show with the artist. We encourage student field trips.
BENNY MERRIS, An Other Another 261, 2024, digital print on translucent acrylic, 60 x 120 in
BENNY MERRIS, An Other Another 254, 2024, digital print on translucent acrylic, 18 x 24 in
PAST EXHIBITIONS
SHOW & TELL
September 14 - October 29, 2024
We are proud to present the culminating exhibition of works by the first wave of artists in our Show & Tell Artist Residency Program with Alexa Rose Foundation. Artists include Rolland Fletcher, Walter Gerald, Emma Hood, Kate Masterson, Hallie Maxwell, Aurora Stone Mehlman, William Guy Miller, Leo Nino, Jeffery Oliver, Hayden Pedersen, Lila Streicher and Shay Woodhouse. The show is eclectic and all-encompassing with oil paintings and altered photographs, silk sculptures, installations and collaborations, works made of clay and leather, films about worms and even a talking bison. The exhibition opened on September 14th with a public reception, live readings by our two writers-in-residence, Miller and Mehlman, as well as two panel discussions — “Creative Synergy in an Interdisciplinary Art Community” and “Showing Up & Making Space for Art” — featuring the artists-in-residence. Throughout the month of October, each resident will present a public artist talk and/or artist-led workshop. Click here for more information and a complete schedule of events.
Our Show & Tell Artist Residency Program launched in May of 2024 with a dozen local artists working at The Common Well in a myriad of disciplines — painting, drawing, printmaking, performance, sculpture, ceramics, photography, creative writing, filmmaking, and new forms. (The next wave of twelve will begin in November 2024.) In addition to a $3,500 honorarium, this transformative new opportunity provides 24 artists with a 6-month studio workspace, mentorship, a culminating group exhibition, as well as an artist talk or workshop at The Common Well. This innovative new program is especially geared toward artists eager to set loose their creative energy and realize their big ideas all within a vibrant community setting. We couldn’t be more thrilled and honored to be working with the Alexa Rose Foundation and know that together we will create lasting, positive outcomes for our most exciting local artists.
The exhibition is open Mondays - Fridays , 9AM - 5PM or by appointment through October 29, 2024. Most works are for sale. Click here for a preview. Follow us on instagram and here for the full schedule of exhibition artist talks and workshops.
Installation view, SHOW & TELL, The Common Well, 2024
All Your Blood Rushes to That Location, 2023, oil and acrylic on canvas, 48x96” and
Bad Behavior is Relative, 2019-2022, oil and screen drawing fluid 48x56”
Installation view, MATTHEW CHAMBERS: Movies About Movies, 2024, The Common Well
MATTHEW CHAMBERS: Movies About Movies
We are excited to welcome home MATTHEW CHAMBERS for a solo exhibition at The Common Well. Chambers grew up in Boise and now lives and works outside of Bozeman, Montana. Chambers is represented by MARINARO and, in addition to his art practice, runs Brackett Creek Exhibitions with Tessa Granowski in Montana and New York City. The works in the show span nearly two decades and reveal a diversity in process, a density of materiality and a sense of knowing and humor that is rooted in both the animate and inanimate, art history and film.
July 11 - September 6, 2024
Yellow, 2024, oil on canvas, 14” x 11” / photograph by Eileen Travell + installation view
MIKI LEE: New Paintings
April 5 - July 5, 2024
The Common Well was thrilled to present a solo show of new paintings by Miki Lee. This new series of abstract paintings, while still full of intense color and energetic repetition, is a sudden departure from the more organized, meditative mark-making in Lee’s past works. These lush new oil paintings are loose and messy, rhythmic and playful, in a way that suggests she is throwing caution to the wind. Lee has figured out how to create a sense of depth through layering, and movement through long, unbroken, undulating brushwork.
Miki Lee was born in Seoul, Korea and has been living and working in New York City since the ‘90s. She received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has had solo exhibitions in New York, San Antonio, Seattle and Chicago. Most recently, Lee’s work has been included in group exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts in Split, Croatia; Galleries Art Fair via Gallery Mark in Seoul, Korea; and at 490 Atlantic in Brooklyn, New York. Lee and her works have been featured in Art in America, Art News, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Chicago Tribune, New Art Examiner, The Seattle Times and Seattle Weekly.
The exhibiton opened with an artist talk and public reception on the evening of April 5th, 2024.
Weeping Colossus, oil on linen, 14.5” x 18.5”, 2023 + installation view
WILLIAM D. LEWIS: Twenty Blue Paintings and two Heads of Silver
November 30, 2023 - March 8, 2024
The exhibition, TWENTY BLUE PAINTINGS AND TWO HEADS OF SILVER, by artist William D. Lewis is a collection of oil paintings, works on paper, and two small silver sculptures. This new body of work by Lewis is a rich and colorful parade of enigmatic, often somber, sometimes bodiless, contemplative beings. The exhibiton opened with a public reception on November 30th, 2023 with music by DJ/artist Grant Olsen. A catalogue with an essay by Jacqueline Crist and a series of responses to the artist’s work by 23 people involved in the arts is available in the gallery and here, along with a recorded conversation between Lewis and fellow artist Alex Carver that happened on January 11th, 2024 in the gallery.
(clockwise from top left) Images from Amy Johnson’s performance, photography, film and video projects — SPRING: The Matanuska Project, Matanuska Glacier, Alaska, 2011; FALL: Tempted Still, Haukijärvi, Finland, 2014; SUMMER: Fireproof, Craters of the Moon National Monument, 2023; and WINTER: The Space Between, Chugach National Forest, Alaska, 2016 / All images by Amy Johnson
AMY JOHNSON: SEASONS QUARTET
September 8 – November 22, 2023
Composed of four, multi-media works – over a decade in the making – Amy Johnson’s SEASONS QUARTET introduced a female archetype with a mythical narrative woven together with ideas of femininity, beauty and the dark reality of climate change. The exhibition opened as part of The Common Well’s Grand Opening on Friday, September 8th, with a reception, artist performance & bluegrass music from Idlytime. The artist gave a talk (available below) about her work in the gallery at noon on October 17th, 2023.
Installation view, STEPHANIE BROOKS, The Common Well, 2023
STEPHANIE BROOKS: TEMPORARILY CLOSE
June 2 - September 1, 2023
The Common Well welcomed Chicago artist Stephanie Brooks to Idaho for our inaugural exhibition, TEMPORARILY CLOSE, in our newly renovated space in Summer 2023. Brooks brings humanity and humor to her conceptual art, poetry, and visual practices. The exhibition included industrial, fabricated works in steel, wood and neon. We hosted a virtual artist talk which can be viewed following the link below. Several works are still available for sale. For details, follow the links below.
POP-UPs
March 15 - 29, 2024
A group exhibition featuring work by local artists Brecken Bird, Teal Gardner, Brigette Nelson, Leo Nino, Stephen Aifegha, Sid Enck and Peter Lovera.
!!! POP-UP GROUP SHOW !!!
!!! POP-UP GROUP SHOW !!!
November 25, 2023
On Saturday night, November 25th, we hosted our first-ever, one-day-only, group exhibition, FALL PRIMER, with fresh art by local artists Marne Elmore, Teal Gardner, Walter Gerald, Elizabeth Hilton, Benjamin Hunt, Aunia Kahn, Grayson Lawless, Lorelle Rau and Jay Smith in the main gallery. Grayson Lawless curated the extravaganza while Rielly MacNeil served up homemade goodness from the tiny gallery and Joe Haege of Shadow Puppet Boise dimmed the lights and took over the artist-in-residence space serving up his natural wine and beer. A good time was had by all!