“Pia Schachter: Defiance” features the artist’s new photographs and video of young men involved in the Death Metal or Extreme Metal music scene. Schachter first became drawn to this world after a personal family tragedy four years ago, when the unexpected lyricism of the music and its fearless embrace of issues of life and death provided a haven for her, a place of catharsis and expression. In her artist’s statement, Schachter says: “What drew me to the Death Metal family was their ability to articulate what pained them. The music is so deafening that it can actually shut off the loudest of inner and environmental burdens. I found myself more and more drawn to the music and to these people, but mostly to my own questions about the human need to belong and my search of what it means to be a mother.” Schachter questions how rebellion and the anger and frustration of youth are expressed in this generation. Her photographs capture the timeless beauty of these young men while providing a contemporary vision of their emotional depth; of the deep sadness underlying the defiance and violence these boys have embraced.

Schachter’s work was recently shown at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, in the Summer 2004 exhibition “Boys Behaving Badly”, organized by Valerie Cassel Oliver, and at the Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown, September 2004. She will be participating in a discussion at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, with William Pollack, author of “Real Boys” next April.
“Donna Veverka: Personal Architecture” presents new sculptural works that look to the form and scale of architecture and archeology, bringing structures and ornamental features that are most often encountered as massive and imposing back to an intimate scale – the scale of the human body – as Veverka’s work is meant to be worn as adornment. Working in sterling silver and gold, with lush, richly colored textile elements, Veverka brings the geometry of the Pantheon’s coffered dome, the orderly quad of a Medieval cloister, spiky Gothic spires and the curved bases of Classical columns to the gallery walls, and to your arm, finger or throat. Her painstakingly crafted work effects a translation of Veverka’s fascination with travel, the international language of domed ceilings and circular stairways, the majesty and ornate visual representations of church and a reverence for form itself, into fine art that turns the tables on the expected relationship between body and building.

Veverka received her BFA from the University of the Arts, Philadelphia College of Art and Design and her MFA from Mass College of Art. She currently teaches at Mass College of Art, and her work was recently featured in “DeCordova Style 2004” at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, and at the Fort Point Artists Community Gallery, Gallery Bershad, and the Fuller Museum “Environmental Arts” in 2002.