Gallery visitor Bev Johnston of Kingston, left, and artist Linda Davis of Sussex, N.J., talk about the many items, from dried flowers to a desiccated duck, that Davis has included in the collage on the wall, which is part of her ‘Decasia’ exhibit at the Wyoming Valley Art League’s Circle Centre for the Arts.
Mary Therese Biebel | Times Leader
Work of artist Linda Davis on display at Circle Centre
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Fava bean pods figure prominently in the photo that artist Linda Davis, left, and gallery visitor Cate Alderman of Dallas are seen discussing during Friday evening’s opening reception.
Mary Therese Biebel | Times Leader
“I think this is phenomenal,” said Constance Denchy, who had just spent 45 minutes driving from her home above Scranton to view the work of artist Linda Davis at the Wyoming Valley Art League’s Circle Centre for the Arts in Downtown Wilkes-Barre.
As she told Davis Friday night during the opening reception, the exhibit was well worth the trip.
“I feel like I’ve found a kindred spirit, because I’m an artist,” Denchy said. “But what I do, you kick it up a notch. You take things most people pass by, and juxtapose them and make them so beautiful.”
Indeed, Davis is always on the lookout for material other people might not even notice — dried flowers from an old bouquet, a fish skeleton, a desiccated duck that had been alongside a road, corn husks and fava bean pods from her own garden in New Jersey.
An exhibit of her work, called “Decasia,” sees beauty in and celebrates these fragile, decaying objects that others might simply discard or disregard.
“What I love about Linda’s work,” gallery director Allison Maslow said, “is the sense of time, and the collecting, and the experimentation.”
Another aspect to admire would be the fascinating stories that figure into Davis’ work.
Images from centuries-old texts, for example, figure into collages that Davis crafted to resemble old-time maps. Davis spotted those old texts, written in Latin and German script, in a portfolio at the first auction she ever attended — at age 13, with her father — and her $10 bid was enough to purchase them.
She grows persimmon and quince — fruits that seem to belong in old-fashioned nursery rhymes — along with flowers of all sorts, and she might overlay a photo of dried blossoms with a photo of corn husks or baroque cherubs or anything else that strikes her fancy.
“There’s a quality of surprise and acccident that I really like in this kind of artwork,” she said, standing before a series of merged photographs.
“The colors are just amazing,” gallery visitor Cate Alderman of Dallas praised the work.
“Absolutely outstanding!” gallery visitor Marie Perks of Forty Fort said as she admired some of Davis’s other pieces, which featured peeling wallpaper the artist had spotted in the Delaware Water Gap Recreational Area, where the federal government bought out homes, now abandoned, for a dam project that never materialized.
“I’ve always had a love of old buildings,” Davis said.
The exhibit continues through Sept. 29 at the Circle Centre for the Arts, rear 130 S. Franklin St., Wilkes-Barre.
