Joe Wight

Somerville Arts Council artwork page.

A place for everything and everything in its place is a tryptic hovering in the moment when fear dissolves into acceptance. These scenes represent questions: Do these people have new found connections or have they lost the ground? Are they bonding with nature or is nature rejecting them? When we take steps toward what we want, our hearts and our minds don’t always respect reality. If we were to break away from comfort, would it look like doing the impossible? How tall are the walls of our prisons and what are we willing to lose to scale them? I’m interested in the leap we take to satisfy our hearts and that feeling that says: just let go, just take that chance.

Chroma is defined as the colorfulness relative to the brightness of a similarly illuminated area.

Calm Under Pressure is about communities of the discarded and how we choose to see them. Chairs are functional objects but they often accommodate embellishments that speak to how we see ourselves. They are modeled and described after the human form and like people, they come in all shapes, colors, and sizes. The objects we make have their own use encoded in their form; handles made for holding and seats made for sitting. When chairs are found on the curb or posted as free to the first to come, the memory of the work that goes into their creation and the people that allowed these objects to cradle their weight feels disrespected. What is offered here in these portraits are ways in which burden presents itself in a safe demeanor, in a safe color.