In my work, I explore how our imagination and memories interact with the natural world. The movement of the earth’s surface has been a source of inspiration and imagery for more than a decade. The surface of the earth has many forces that affect it.   

My Sculptural Drawings -  3-dimensional reliefs - have been “in the ocean” for many years, but in this show my pieces move on land as the waters flood our coasts.

Maps, charts, and photographs form the basis for my work. I invite viewers to imagine themselves within the landscape, in topographical waterscapes I scan charts and weather maps, alter them in Photoshop, and print them. Then they are reassembled to form imagined coastal images–the effects of anthropogenic global warming. Although maps imply a viewer looking down at the landscape, I hope that the dimensional qualities of my images allow us imagine ourselves within it; to inhabit the seas as another way of understanding.

Artist Bio

Phyllis Ewen lives in Massachusetts, with studios in Somerville and Wellfleet. Her art is in public collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the DeCordova Museum, the Boston Public Library, Harvard University, the Reykjanes Museum of Art, and numerous corporate and private collections. Ewen’s work has been shown widely. She is a gallery artist at Kingston Gallery in Boston and AIR in Brooklyn. Her first Kingston Galley show, Shifting Currents/Deep Water Rising was in 2017.  Ewen’s work was in a well-received 3-artist exhibit at the Reykjanes Museum of Art in Iceland, Við Sjónarrönd/Above And Below The Horizon, a two-person show, Imprint, in York Maine, and a solo, Land and Water, at the Lesley University Spotlight Gallery. In 2018. Her work was included in HOW’S YOUR WEATHER? 7 Artists Respond to Climate Change, at the Grimshaw-Gudewicz Art Gallery, Bristol Community College, Fall River. She has had several solo shows in Cuba and at the A.I.R Gallery, where she has been a member since 2005.

Center Gallery

Inundation District a film by David Abel 

INUNDATION DISTRICT is an award-winning feature-length film about the implications of one city’s decision to ignore the threats posed by climate change and spend billions of dollars on building a new waterfront district — on landfill, at sea level.

In a time of rising seas and intensifying storms, one of the world’s wealthiest, most-educated cities made a fateful decision to spend billions of dollars erecting a new district along its coast — on landfill, at sea level. Unlike other places imperiled by climate change, this neighborhood of glass towers housing some of the world’s largest companies was built well after scientists began warning of the threats, including many at its renowned universities. The city, which already has more high-tide flooding than nearly any other in the United States, called its new quarter the Innovation District. But with seas rising inexorably, and at an accelerating rate, others are calling the neighborhood by a different name: Inundation District.