October 2025

Curiosities

Melissa McClung

October 8 - October 30

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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.

• Melissa McClung

  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.

  IG@melissasmarbles

  www.melissamcclung.com

September 2025

Circo

Mariana Cicerchia

September 5 - September 26

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Opening Reception on Arts Night Out

The performer stands alone, removed from the crowd, in the darkened spaces of the show. They leap, hurling themselves into the unknown. The crowd cheers as the performer is suspended in air, fully aware of the uncertainty of the outcome. What appears to be a joyous performance is an act of sacrifice, a death-defying act emphasizing the solitude and inherent risks faced by performers who seek validation from an audience to which they may never fully belong.

The circus is an itinerant place for loners and outcasts who belong nowhere but in the world of the transient. They are faceless, inhabiting the peripheries of society. Their ability to entertain is their perceived worth, their identity. Performers, often marginalized, engage in acts that entertain while risking their identity and safety, reflecting deeper themes of loneliness and the human psyche's complexities.

Circo by Mariana Cicerchia serves as a framework to examine societal contracts and the dynamics of power within familial and communal contexts, uncovering themes of belonging and otherness, questioning who holds power and who is deemed "other" in society. A circus is about occupying space but not being of that space. A removable object which leaves no imprint, no trace. As if it never existed

• Mariana Cicerchia

  Mariana (b.1977, she/her) Born amid the turmoil of a brutal dictatorship in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the artist channels her experiences of isolation and outsider identity into her visual art. Her work explores themes of solitude, belonging, and the search for a timeless language that transcends cultural boundaries. Through her practice, Cicerchia examines fundamental truths and critically addresses the micro and macro dynamics of societal structures.

  Circo offers a framework for critically examining social contracts and the dynamics of power inherent within familial and communal environments. It addresses concepts of belonging and exclusion by probing issues related to authority and the pursuit of validation. The circus setting serves as a metaphor for impermanence, where performers inhabit spaces temporarily, underscoring the fleeting nature of identity and acceptance.

  IG@mariana.cicerchiaxt goes here