Summer Intern Spotlight: Ethan Wood

Project title: RICK

Ethan Wood is a writer and artist from Ashby, Massachusetts and a senior at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts majoring in English and Communications, minoring in art. His work uses vivid imagery to connect to the emotional psyche of audience members. His photography takes on a life of its own, incorporating themes of Americana, nostalgia, and dreamlike wonder that expresses beauty and loss in the common day. Ethan is very interested in telling stories and expressing truth through various mediums.  

I am interning in the MOSAIC Summer Arts Immersion Residency (Air) program through Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. The role of an intern at Gallery 51 is to assist in the organization of the building which includes going through the past to sort through old records of the building and dispose of what is no longer usable for MOSAIC. We also collaborate to update the mailing lists, flyers and information for the general public, and visit various art programs in the Berkshires to see the amazing work that other artists and venues are doing in our area. My main responsibility in the gallery is working on the flyers and using my experience in Typography to think about accessibility needs whilst making the posters aesthetically pleasing. I also help with the gallery in greeting guests and taking down their information for the mailing list, making a note of how many people are entering the gallery throughout the day. 

This program has given me such an important opportunity to push my experience in working professionally in an art field. As a creative person I often feel like there aren’t enough opportunities for artists to sustain a life working in the creative fields which has always disheartened me, but working in a gallery has shown me that when you are dedicated and committed to the arts there will always be people showing up to support you. Art is one of those things that I believe is the life force of humanity, and artists will always find other artists, people will always show up to see what you have created. In the gallery sometimes there would be days where it would feel like nobody was coming in, but there would often be at least one person, and that one person is a reminder that Art is never going away. I had the opportunity to meet with some amazing mentors who pushed my creativity in directions I never knew they could go and I think that’s what I would take away most from this residency, that artists helping artists comes from connections in places like Gallery 51 and I feel lucky to have been able to take advantage of that opportunity. 

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One of the things I was lucky enough to experience in this internship was the ability to work on my personal project in a studio setting. I had never had the opportunity to work in a large space with feedback from professional creatives before and I wanted to use these advantages to work on something larger than I usually work with! My project was making a large scale, sustainable, papier-mache shelf using a method called Paper clay, I used this process to create a piece that I felt had a life of its own. It was so large that as I filled it in and worked on it more days than not, I felt that I was creating something living, something that could breathe life into me as I breathed life into it. And the more mentors I spoke to about the piece and the more suggestions I got from my peers, it started feeling like the community was breathing life into it as well. The thing I love most about my project is that it’s almost completely made from recycled materials from the community. The boxes I used as bases were from MCLA’s cardboard room, my own recycling, and MOSAIC’s basement. The paper I shredded down for the paper clay was mostly foraged through old records of the gallery dating back to 2006-2014, even some of the resources I used to make the shelf were given to me by professors from MCLA. I had also made a collection of handmade books for the community to engage with in the reception and most, if not all, of the paper used to make those books was given to me from people in the Berkshire community, and some people from my hometown in Townsend, Mass. All in all, this internship has given me the opportunity to feel like I am making something that does not belong to me anymore, it belongs to everyone who has helped me shape this project, and to everyone who has interacted with it.