FUTURELAND

PRESS RELEASE

The Fort Point Arts Community Gallery is pleased to announce Futureland, the third show of the 2017-2018 season, juried by Mary Tinti. 

Futureland is a two-person, site-specific installation of new work created for the FPAC Gallery by Mea Duke and Douglas Breault. The installation title, Futureland, derives from the name for the information center for the artificial island of Maasvlakte, a deep-water port in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Maasvlakte’s landform started developing in the 1960s during Rotterdam’s postwar revitalization, continues to grow, and is engineered to serve as a major stopover for the global shipping industry, capable of birthing the world’s largest ships. 

Duke and Breault incorporate how “sea-blindness,” a term more generally understood as “out of sight, out of mind,” relates to how unapparent it is how goods make their way to our stores and homes. The continuously increasing size and efficiency of the shipping industry somehow makes it harder to see. Duke and Breault chew over the sheer volume of everyday goods that crisscross the globe, from bananas to automobiles and oil, and the vast impact the trillion-dollar shipping industry has on the environment, the global economy, international relations, and cultures. The artists’ enlist painting, printmaking, sculpture, and photography to intertwine the familiarity of the objects with their absurd and elusive navigation through unregulated spaces globally.

“I was impressed by the research, history, and novelty made manifest in this Pop-laced proposal,” says Tinti. “I love the way it connects directly to Boston Harbor and approaches facets of globalism, shipping, trade, and commercialism in an unexpected way.”

Mea Duke is a painter, printmaker, and sculptor whose work implicates our political and economic relationships with the global shipping industry and environmental impact of maritime operations. Duke grounds her interdisciplinary approach to practice and research within one broad interest: the negotiation and navigation of unregulated spaces and the methods and hazards that exist therein. This broad question motivates her to create a humorous exploration of the lines between “painting an object” and “painting as an object.” Rather than make art that delivers this statement, Duke finds asking further questions and pointing out these moments in our everyday lives is more accessible and visually satisfying. Duke is on the faculty at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and Montserrat College of Art and a Postgraduate Teaching Fellow at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University.

Douglas Breault, an interdisciplinary artist, has expanded an initial focus on photography to include painting, sculpture, installation, and video. Breault overlaps and mangles media, creating hybrid artworks in which the physicality of the materials are simultaneously strategic and improvisational. Gestural acts of decision making, spatial relationships, and repeated imagery become a dialogical algorithm largely informed by art history, digital media, and unraveling identity. Phenomenological traces of tape, lines, paint, and deconstructed objects combine to act as a particular visual archive that moves through space and chance. Breault has exhibited extensively at venues throughout the Northeast, including the Bristol Art Museum, the Rochester Museum of Fine Arts, and the Stone Gallery at Boston University.

On February 1, 2018, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Senior Thesis Program, instructed by Andy Graydon and Kendall Reiss, will visit the exhibition for an informal artist talk and exhibition tour with the artists Mea Duke and Douglas Breault. This public is invited to attend and to contribute to the discussion and observe in the space. In preparation for the students’ upcoming senior thesis exhibition, the topics will range from conceptual and formal elements of the installation to the technical aspects of installing and promoting an exhibition as artists. Duke and Breault will discuss writing press releases and artist statements. They will also lead exercises in viewing their own artwork objectively and critically when installing an exhibition.

About the Juror

Mary M. Tinti is an independent curator and art historian specializing in contemporary New England art and public art. Prior to her most recent position as curator of the Fitchburg Art Museum, Tinti was a Koch Curatorial Fellow at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, the first-ever Public Art Fellow at the New England Foundation for the Arts, and the Deputy Artistic Director of WaterFire Providence. Tinti received her B.A. from Providence College and her Ph.D. from Rutgers University. 

About the FPAC Gallery 

The FPAC Gallery, operated by the Fort Point Arts Community, Inc. of South Boston (FPAC), is a non-profit community organization founded in 1980. The gallery is fully programmed and staffed by volunteers. FPAC’s mission is to promote the work of our artists to a broad and diverse audience; to preserve the artists community in the Fort Point Channel area; to ensure the continuance of permanent, affordable studio space; to build community; and to increase the visibility of the arts in Fort Point. Fort Point is one of New England’s largest artist communities, home to over 300 artists who produce work in a wide array of media.

Gallery hours: Tues-Fri: 11:00 am – 3:00 pm and by appointment. 

FPAC website: www.fortpointarts.org