McKenzie Fine Art is pleased to announce its summer group exhibition, “The Story Goes,” featuring paintings, drawings and sculpture by: Henry Brown, Jim Dingilian, Stephen Hannock, David Kramer, Katharine Kuharic, Jean Lowe, Nava Lubelski, Tom Moran, Maki Tamura, Eugenie Tung, Michael Waugh, and Laura Sharp Wilson.

The exhibition explores the ways in which artists create narratives in their work with minimal or no reliance on the representation of the human form, the traditional and expected carrier of story-telling in image making.

Possessions help define an individual’s personality and tell a story about a type of life lead. In Jean Lowe’s humorous self-help and how-to tomes made from papier-mâché, the artist constructs a narrative of modern-day desires and individual insecurities, while skewering contemporary mores. The recording of financial gains and losses is examined by Nava Lubelski in her topographic sculptures of shredded and rolled annual financial documents, and by Tom Moran in his abstractions and landscape paintings whose linear structures are defined by a record of his stock market trades and their attendant gains and losses over a set period.

Text appears initially as abstract mark-making in Stephen Hannock’s landscape paintings of the Connecticut River Oxbow, but closer examination reveals a diaristic record of his friendships and important life events in western Massachusetts. In a more light-hearted vein, David Kramer typewrites his hilarious essays recording his life as an artist in New York, using banal images of consumption as his illustration. Michael Waugh constructs his image of an ox pulling a riderless wagon-a metaphor for our current political climate-solely through script comprised of past presidential inaugural speeches. Also political is Katharine Kuharic’s surreal landscape depicting a spiraling, tornado-shaped American flag coiling within an effulgent field of irises, while Laura Sharp Wilson’s botanical and architectonic imagery creates a narrative expressing her despair over environmental degradation and loss.

Other artists refer to film and theatre in their stage-like but un-peopled environments: Eugenie Tung photographs her home and work settings but paints over images of figures and evidence of work and activity, creating a ghost-like setting that denies specific memory; Jim Dingilian makes drawings on found school desktops, replete with the marks and scratches recording their use by previous owners, of banal suburban settings that have an air of menace and expectancy.

Other examinations of narrative forms include the work of Maki Tamura, who paints fairy tale-like imagery of storybook figures and animals on a lattice in an intentional fragmentation of linear narrative, while Henry Brown retains the pencil under-drawing in his abstract paintings to reveal a narrative of their substructure, planning and execution.