Image: Andrew Mowbray, Variant 7, 2020, Tyvek Home Wrap and thread, 25 1/2 x 25 1/2 inches; photo credit: Will Howcroft.

Art Wellesley is delighted to partner with the Wellesley Free Library to host and celebrate the work of guest curator and Wellesley resident Rachael Arauz with an exhibition entitled, Shelter, abstracted. The exhibition will feature the art of Meg Alexander, Emily Hass, and Andrew Mowbray.

It will be on display in the Wellesley Free Library Main Foyer from February 3rd thru 28th. A panel discussion with the curator and featured artists will take place on February 6, 2025 at 6:30pm in the Wakelin Room.

Shelter, abstracted. features three artists who use geometric forms to explore the fragility and resilience of architecture. Meg Alexander’s blue quadrilaterals represent the sky seen through windows, floating in an expanse of white paper and untethered to their domestic space. Often specific to a passage of time or a meaningful location, her drawings propose these transparent structures as both barriers and portals.

To create her spare evocations of residential architecture, Emily Hass spent time in Berlin archives researching the homes left behind by Jewish artists and intellectuals, as well as her own father, who fled Germany during the Nazi regime. While the titles for each drawing anchor the work to a specific address, Hass’s use of rich black gouache on vintage paper fills these floorplans and building sections with a haunted sense of loss.

Andrew Mowbray utilizes actual building materials—the Tyvek wrap that provides a water barrier in housing construction—to create his works. Piecing and sewing cut sections of Tyvek to construct large quilt squares, he proposes an analogy between a home and a human body, each benefitting from the warmth and protection of a textile blanket.

Architecture surrounds us every day—the homes we live in, the new construction we observe, the buildings we’ve passed through, the structures we may recall only through memory. By isolating and abstracting elements of the forms we shelter in, these three artists turn the viewer’s attention to the way in which architecture holds meaning.