The Artwork of South End artist Gisela Griffith

The October Local Focus installation will feature the innovative, thought-provoking, and beautiful artwork of South End-based artist Gisela Griffith paintings, assemblages, and three-dimensional artwork Gisela Griffith examines how dogma affects pressing global issues, like religious fundamentalism, climate change, the pandemic, and the relationship between plants and humans.

Gisela Griffith, a St. Botolph Street resident, has been working from her studio in the South End since 2002. After raising a family in Chicago, the German-born visual artist relocated to Boston and attended the Museum of Fine Arts Diploma Program. She has participated in numerous exhibitions in the Boston area. 

In paintings, assemblages and three-dimensional artwork, Griffith examines how dogma affects pressing global issues like religious fundamentalism, climate change, the pandemic and the relationship between plants and humans. 

In her SUSPENDING DISBELIEF series, Griffith deconstructed and reassembled biblical images as a block puzzle, suggesting religious rigidity. But as an unfinished puzzle “full of uncertainty and contradiction,” wrote Boston Globe art critic Cate McQuaid in 2017, it “may better represent life and faith.”

Griffith’s NOWHERE TO GO paintings were inspired by the stunningly beautiful images of the universe transmitted by the Hubble Space Telescope. For the artist, they evoked the same reverence that religious icons call upon: sanctity, unity and awe in the context of creation. “With the Covid pandemic, climate change seems all but forgotten,” Griffith says, “but I continue to work through current anxieties by focusing on paintings inspired by the images of the universe.”

In her decade-old SECRETS OF NATURE constructs, Griffith’s Birch Bark Icons began as nature’s “litterfall” from birches. The artist, a lover of nature, applies metallic leaf, 23K gold or copper to the interior of the birch’s bark, producing a radiating light from within that transforms the “litterfall” into an icon of the forest. 

For further information, contact the artist at giselagriffith@gmail.com or visit her website at www.giselagriffith.com

Dollhouses and "The Wonderful World of Miniatures"

In a sign of hope for normalcy, the first Local/Focus installation in the Tremont Street window since the South End library closed in March is now on view. It features the magical interiors of three dollhouses, or ‘miniatures,’ as their creator, Floy Miller, likes to describe them, including a replica of a lighthouse. Miller has built some two dozen of them and, her partner Charlotte Cole, fears they may have to build an extra wing at their house on Martha’s Vineyard to accommodate them all. Miller would like to know how they can be used in the future: In schools, to help children create stories around them? Or simply as backgrounds in our rooms to allow our imagination to take us away, to a lighthouse, to a house in the suburbs, to a home as it was lived in a century ago…? Your suggestions are welcome.

The exhibit will be up till the end of September. The poster was created by FOSEL advisor, Reinhold Mahler.

St Stephens Episcopal Church