Alice Denison, Jane Paradise, and Larry R. Collins—September 6 – 26, 2024
Provincetown, MA: The Alden Gallery will present a three-person show of new work by Alice Denison, Jane Paradise, and Larry R. Collins, opening on Friday, September 6, 2024, at 423 Commercial St. The artists’ reception will be on Friday, September 6, from 7 to 9 p.m. The show will be on view through September 26.
Alice Denison is a graduate of MassArt’s former MFA program at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and has been with the Alden Gallery since its inception in 2007. She returns this year with a series of works called “Tonic.” Denison’s art often plays on images of flora in decorative objects: tapestries, needlepoint, wallpaper. For “Tonic,” she has painted a series of monotone paintings of herbs on Arches Huile paper. “Last year,” Denison explains, “a large painting of mine that was in a big show caused a viewer to sob. This got me thinking, as most things do, about what power a painting can have. And that got me dreaming about what power I wish a painting could have. The plants in ‘Tonic’are known — or suspected — remedies for specific complaints. All are conditions that I, or people I love, suffer from.”
In 2022, photographer Jane Paradise unveiled prints from her book, Dune Shacks of Provincetown, at the Alden Gallery, which have subsequently appeared in shows at the Cape Cod Museum of Art and the Mary Heaton Vorse House. This season, she is presenting a new series of new 8 x 8-inch metal prints called “Beach Point, Truro.” “Traveling along Shore Road (Route 6A) in the area of Truro known as Beach Point, I photographed remnants of the past in the present,” Paradise says. “Peaked roofs and other features of the local architecture’s vernacular still survive. The structures and incidental objects I found are elegant and beautiful in their simplicity and imperfection. They have survived years of weathering without change. But today, rents are skyrocketing and property values are out of reach. The once “rundown” cottages — such as Scotts rentals, where I spent childhood summers — are now condos beyond the grasp of the middle class. Beach Point is changing. Inevitably.”
Larry R. Collins was born in Spokane, Washington in 1945 and raised in Del City, Oklahoma. His career began at age 17, when Dorothy Miller, former curator of collections at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, selected one of his paintings for an important regional exhibition at the Oklahoma Art Center. After graduating with a BFA from the University of Oklahoma in 1967, Collins was drafted into the Army and sent to Vietnam. During the war, he served as an infantryman and combat illustrator.
In the years since, Collins has had a celebrated career as an artist and art professor. His paintings, drawings, and photographs have exhibited internationally and are included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts. Boston; the International Center of Photography; the New York Public Library; and the Wadsworth Atheneum. He joined the Alden Gallery in 2023, and this year he is showing two oil paintings that were recently completed, including Remember Me, a portrait of a fellow soldier in Vietnam whose death has haunted Collins throughout his life.
The Alden Gallery is open daily, 11 a.m.-5 p.m., and Wednesday through Saturday evenings, 6-9 p.m., through September 15, after which it will be open weekends through New Year’s Day, 2024. It is free and open to the public. During gallery hours, call 508-487-4230; off-hours, call 646-483-8164.
Press contact: Howard Karren, at aldengallery@gmail.com or 646-483-8164.