An appropriate first exhibition for the start of the academic year, when connections that will last a lifetime are just being formed, Befriend: Work by Meghan Morris and Eva Zasloff opened in the Ishibashi Gallery on September 14, 2023. Members of the Middlesex community, along with the artists and many friends, gathered at a well-attended reception that evening, giving students and faculty a chance to view and discuss this second artistic collaboration between Morris and Zasloff.
Befriend includes 13 paintings with one or more sculptures juxtaposed near them. The works clearly complement and relate to one other through form and color, “as they embody the experience of finding, developing, and sustaining friendship,” the artists’ statement details.
Morris, a sculptor, first met Zasloff, a family doctor and painter, back in 2018, when Morris was seeking a pediatrician for her first child. The two describe feeling an “immediate connection, which grew over time and came to include their respective art practices.” While Zasloff’s paintings often reflect on topics about the transformative nature of pregnancy, birth, and being newly born, Morris is inspired by the idea of forms in constant evolution: a bud slowly opening, a fern unfurling, a wave cresting. Her ceramic work utilizes hand-built sculptural forms and wheel-thrown vessels, both of which evoke organic gesture – and not only echo one another’s sweeping shapes but also mirror the arcing strokes in Zasloff’s paintings.
The works in this exhibition explore “what it means to befriend – to befriend another, to befriend all of the unseeable parts of ourselves, to befriend the world in all of its beauty and complexity,” the artists elaborate.
Befriend will be on view in the Ishibashi Gallery from September 14 to November 4, 2023.