Oblique & Acute Angles of Vision

The Brattleboro Museum & Art Center is welcoming spring to southern Vermont with five new exhibitions (all through July 11) featuring the works of 18 contemporary artists. They present a lively mix of artists from the region and from away that continues the Brattleboro MAC’s commitment to seasonal shows with wide visual appeal.

Occupying the museum’s main gallery is a group show entitled Oblique/Acute that uses extreme point of view as the organizing principle to bring together the works of six artists.

The best known of the six is probably Yvonne Jacquette, who has painted aerial views of urban and rural landscapes all over the world, often at night such the human world glows from on high. “Above Times Square,” for instance, is a night view of a skyscraper under construction, the angle of view locked in to the vertical geometry of New York City. The exhibition also features black and white photographs of New York by Jacquette’s late husband Rudy Burckhardt.

Debra Bermingham, Jacquette’s stablemate at D.C. Moore Gallery in New York, shows still, misty, ethereal paintings that have an almost otherworldly point of view – distant, detached, godlike. Israeli artist Maya Gold contributes paintings in which discrete objects are seen from directly overhead. David Kapp creates painterly evocations of urban street life from a bird’s eye perspective. And Nicola L