WELL Opening Reception

Join Simmons University’s Trustman Art Gallery for the opening reception of WELL featuring work by Eben Haines on Thursday, April 18 from 5 – 8 PM. The exhibition is on view from Monday, April 8, 2024 – Friday, May 17, 2024. 

In WELL, Haines presents a series of disjointed assemblages intended to reveal the fractures in the spyglass of capitalism, through which we’re made to believe that if one cannot afford a place in the world, then one does not deserve a place in the world. The exhibition title refers to the largest installation in the show, an immersive work that invites viewers to enter into the bottom of a well. Within worn down infrastructures and waterlogged interiors that was once a home becomes a shell of a past life, Haines places the viewer as a spectator of the future, observing the forgotten artifacts of our present. In WELL, Haines envisions a future born from the wreckage and a potential to restabilize the remnants of the past to rebuild a community based on empathy and acts of solidarity with our neighbors to guarantee the future protection of our most vulnerable people, places, and spaces. 

Haines’ work depicts the future as we expect it, isolated and tenuous with objects already aged and outdated. The passage of time curls the edge of draped linen, weathers the surfaces of wooden assemblages and leaves smudged soot and hardened wax drippings from candles once ignited. Worn down objects are precariously balanced within displaced domestic structures; on canvas, Haines abstracts space and defies gravity as he confronts viewers with the volatility of their present circumstances. Comets, seen as impending forces of destruction race across bucolic landscapes like shooting stars, symbols of hope as the fate of our future relies on what we make of what we have today. 

Eben Haines was born in Boston, MA in 1990, and he received his BFA with honors from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2013. Haines was a recipient of the 2018 Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship in Drawing, as well as the 2021 James and Audrey Foster Prize from the ICA Boston. He and his wife Delaney Dameron received a 2020 Transformative Public Arts Grant from the city of Boston to help continue their work with Shelter In Place Gallery, an ongoing miniature art gallery project they opened during the COVID 19 Pandemic to show artists’ work online while the city was in lockdown. He recently deinstalled a 3-month durational sculpture that was part of the 2023 Now + There Public Art Accelerator Program. Haines lives and works in Boston, MA.

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