THE BARN DOOR GALLERY
AT 33 HAWLEY
Stewarded by the Northampton Center for the Arts (NCFA), the Barn Door Gallery supports our mission to foster community connections through the arts, and is a dedicated venue for evolving, transformative dialogue between artists and audiences.
OPEN HOURS:
12 pm - 7 pm - Wednesday, Thursday, Friday & Saturday
Closed - Sunday, Monday & Tuesday
The Barn Door Gallery is ADA compliant and admission is free.
Additional information can be found on our FAQ document.
THE SPLIT LEVEL GALLERY AT 33 HAWLEY
Stewarded by the Northampton Center for the Arts (NCFA) and A.P.E . (Available Potential Enterprises, Ltd.) the curation of this gallery is shared by both building partner organizations and supports our mission to foster collaboration and community connections through the arts.
Current Exhibits:
November Barn Door Gallery 2025
Tributary
Cassidy Clark
November 5 - November 22
Opening Reception on Arts Night Out
Probably somewhere between your outer ear and the location of the voice in your head as you read this is a chamber of fluid in your inner ear known as endolymph. That liquid is crucial for your sensations of hearing, balance, and orientation. It gives you an indescribable sensation of which way is up. It tells you whether you are upright, laying on the ground, or swimming in the ocean. If the world turned upside down, you’d be the first to know.
Tributary is my exploration of stillness, turbulence, and the tension that photography creates between the two. The spark for this project was Jeff Wall’s essay “Photography and Liquid Intelligence,” which explores how liquids used to create images are abstractly reflected in photography’s ability to capture complex, organic forms, such as liquid itself. In my work, this concept extends outward from the visual to the physical, represented not just in images but in the unique forms their prints take.
As such, Tributary has its own liquid origin, in the milk-white melted silver gelatin, or home-brewed blood-red bleach-fix bath sloshing nearly silently in its wide, shallow tray. Turbulence itself is expressed in the uncontrollable variables in my work. The steel subsurface of geography I, rusted by rainfall, acid etched, and stained with steel bluing, is one such example.
My goal is to explore this liquid turbulence through its contrasting and complimentary form, stillness. The species of stillness on display here range from the undisturbed morning air in geography II to the balanced tension of w/r/t. The moments rest between inhale and exhale. But what looks like a placid surface has a pulse underneath, waiting for the stillness to break. Probably somewhere between your outer ear and the location of the voice in your head as you read this is a chamber of fluid in your inner ear known as endolymph. That liquid is crucial for your sensations of hearing, balance, and orientation. It gives you an indescribable sensation of which way is up. It tells you whether you are upright, laying on the ground, or swimming in the ocean. If the world turned upside down, you’d be the first to know.
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Cassidy Clark (she/her) is an artist and photographer looking at circumstantial artifacts of images, such as (finger)prints. For her, the key to understanding images is to look around them at what isn't usually visible. Her work is usually based in portraiture and story, with an interest in how gaze and touch can be carried through physical media. More recently, Cassidy has been working to describe the various architectures of visual and visualized data that moderate the 21st century.
IG@carsicksadly
October 2025
Curiosities
Melissa McClung
October 8 - October 30
Opening Reception on Arts Night Out
Curiosities by Melissa McClung is an exhibit of collages, flipbooks, and moving images from the artist’s cabinet. Melissa made the work from 2020 - 2025, while she was otherwise occupied with teaching, animating for a feature documentary, resting, growing a human, laboring, breastfeeding, mothering, dreaming of her next film project, dreaming of a better world, walking in the woods, distance running, swimming in rivers and oceans, and connecting with creative friends.
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Melissa McClung (she/her) is a filmmaker, animator, and visual artist based in Hadley, MA. Melissa has above-the-line credits on films that have premiered at SXSW, CPH:DOX, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and Maryland Film Festival, among many others. Melissa began making collages during the pandemic while listening to Agatha Christie audiobooks. In her multidisciplinary work, she often finds herself gravitating towards themes of childhood, wonder, women/mothers, and nature, with imaginative retro-scifi motifs. She makes work in New England, solo and with regional collaborators.
In addition to her creative work, Melissa co-owns Ghost Hit Recording Studio in West Springfield with her husband, audio engineer Andrew Oedel. Melissa earned her MFA in Film from Vermont College of Fine Arts and her BA from Vassar College. Melissa is the recipient of Vassar’s 2024 W.K. Rose Fellowship. She has taught in the Department of Art at UMass Amherst, and she is currently a Professor of the Practice in the Film, Media, and Communications Department at Wheaton College in Norton, MA.