'Transformations; Forms & Energies in Flux'
Anne Tcherepnin, Oil Paintings
Dunya McPherson, Dance & Film
Transformations: Forms & Energies in Flux brings together the work of painter Anne Tcherepnin and choreographer/dancer Dunya McPherson in an exhibition exploring the dynamic forces of change in nature and human experience. While working in distinct artistic mediums, both artists share a deep interest in transformation, impermanence, and the forces—visible and subtle—that shape the world around us.
Artist Reception & Dance Performance, Sunday, September 6, from 12:00–1:15 p.m. will feature a dance performance by Dunya McPherson, a New York Times acclaimed dancer and NEA Choreographer, whose live dance and projected dance films expand the exhibition’s themes into movement and moving image.
On view throughout September and October in the UUFalmouth Atrium, 840 Sandwich Rd, Falmouth, MA 02536, Anne Tcherepnin’s award-winning expressive oil paintings capture shifting light, atmosphere, and movement through luminous landscapes and evocative studies of horses, birds, and the human figure. Her painterly, impressionistic approach reveals nature as a world in continual flux.
Following the performance, visitors are invited to join Anne Tcherepnin and Dunya McPherson for a conversation about their shared artistic influences and creative processes.
About the Artists
Anne Tcherepnin, Artist Statement: “Capturing the light is everything. It is always the light that I remember most about any location, figure, or still life. Its elusive quality transforms what we see, and I strive to convey that sense of place by capturing its fleeting magic.”
Anne Tcherepnin is an expressive oil painter whose work explores the transformative qualities of light, atmosphere, and movement through landscapes, figures, birds, and horses. Working in a painterly, impressionistic style, she invites viewers to experience nature as a living presence in continual change.
Dunya McPherson Artist Statement
‘Transformations’ is a meditative dialogue between a live dancer and a filmed dancer. The contemplative film, featuring a solitary dancer moving through the vast high-desert wilderness of New Mexico, serves as a backdrop, an ambient environment, and a dance partner. The live dancer is accompanied by the natural sounds of wind moving across rock promontories and through forests.
In my live performance, the dance focuses on evolutionary creature motion—which I experience as root movement forms within my own body—as well as the environment of gravity, texture, temperature directly impinging on my body. The skin surface is particulary rich in impulses. In the video componenent, one segment is leaves and grasses carried by wind, then a quiet verticality of dense, shadow-dappled juniper woods where the wind has died down. Faint breezes shift trunks and branches, thus the light and shadow. Animals move quietly. The final scene is a human moving in sensual undulation on the warm rock of a vertiginous cliff in late-day sun—the serpent basking.
Many of these images are in Anne Tcherepnin’s paintings. The way she pauses and sees is also a way in which I have chosen the core topics for my performance.
Dunya McPherson, is a choreographer, performer, educator, author, and founder of Dancemeditation™. Juilliard School graduate, NYTimes acclaimed dancer, and a National Endowment for the Arts Choreography Fellow, her performances integrate movement and contemplative practice drawn from the visceral language of Japanese Butoh, modern dance lineages, and the mystical movement traditions of Sufism. She creates performances of striking beauty, presence, and depth. For Transformations: Forms & Energies in Flux, live dance is interwoven with projected dance films created in the epic nature landscapes of the American Southwest, expanding the dialogue between body, image, and place.
Video Coming!
We are sponsored by Dervish Society of America, a nonprofit organization helping people realize their human and spiritual potential by honoring their body and its movement ways using evolutionary Sufi Dancemeditation practices. Your gift is tax-deductible ~