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Opening Reception
Saturday, January 13 at 6:00 PMConversation with the Artist
Saturday, January 13 at 6:30 PM
Essex Art Center is thrilled to open its 2024 exhibition season with Parts and Pieces of the Universe by Leah Piepgras. Piepgras is a Texas-born North Andover resident who was raised in a family of artists. Trained formally as a sculptor, Piepgras gracefully traverses performance, painting, and installation.
Parts and Pieces of the Universe is a snapshot of a lifetime of creative work that grapples with our human mortality and explores the magic and mysteries of life. Piepgras tells the story of personal experiences in a mythological form, allowing us to see how the artist understands and relates to the world. The Earth Mother, Infinite Body, and God's Eyes are recurring figures in her work that embody ideas of generosity, labor, healing, and the presence of and our connection to the divine.
The exhibition will feature the installation Fight Cloud, a whirling arrangement of 135 plaster-cast hands that express the power of channeling our emotions—even ones seen as unfavorable, such as anger. Parts and Pieces of the Universe will also include several never-seen-before sculptural works created this year. Through the scale and accumulation of works on view, Piegras invites us to share the wonder and awe she experiences when grounded in the natural world.
Informed by the study of paradox, physics, geology, anatomy, and her own bouts with illness, the artist considers big existential questions often spiritual in nature, such as Why am I here? and At what point do I become me? In Piepgras' work—space, time, and our physical form are woven like cloth—expanding and contracting forever.