“Sample a Visual Arts Buffet” With The Everson’s Exhibit Realities Within

Excerpt from a review written by Carl Mellor and published by CNY Arts.

Realities Within at the Everson Museum is expansive: an exhibition that displays well over 100 artworks and has an ambitious agenda. According to text accompanying the show, it seeks to “explore how artists shape, frame and inhabit the world.”

The works, all selected from the Everson’s collection, are organized by genre. They include still-life pieces, cityscapes, landscapes, and artworks portraying the human body.

That mode of organization encourages viewers to consider both individual pieces and make connections between works created during different eras and by artists with varying styles. For this kind of exhibit, diversity is a given, and so is the opportunity to sample a visual arts buffet.

For example, the Still Life segment of the show presents pieces like “Still Life with a Green Bottle,” a pastel-and-gouache work by Bradley Walker Tomlin, and “Still Life with Chair,” Lena Gurr’s woodblock. Both seem to fit in with a conventional view of still-life creations.

And yet, the exhibition also displays Erin Wright’s acrylic paint, pastel, and colored pencil artwork, “Knobs,” where a doorknob is portrayed in a way that seems to delve deeper into our relationship with objects.

Erin Wright
Knobs, 2024
Acrylic paint, pastel, and colored pencil on paper with white oak frame, 28⅝ x 22⅝ inches
Everson Museum of Art; Museum purchase, Deaccession Fund, 2024.16.2