Rural Rituals: Tending Table & Land
Art Exhibit & Opening Celebration
Tony(a) Lemos, Artist
On Display at Elmer's Store in Ashfield MA
396 Main St Ashfield, MA
December 5th through January 2026
Artist Reception:
Sunday, December 7 from 1 PM to 3 PM
Items off of Wicked Good Café full menu will be available to purchase until 2 pm; coffee and baked goods available to purchase until 3 pm
This exhibition invites visitors into two intertwined worlds of care, presence, and imagination.
In one room, intimate portraits celebrate a few of the local women who have participated in the Surreal Times Dinner Project, celebrating the humor, vulnerability, and unexpected beauty of sharing a meal with strangers. These works explore the table as a site of care, connection, conversation, and ritual.
In the second room, gridded photopolymer prints gather close-up photographs from my morning walks, moss, lichen, seaweed, bark, sky, some familiar, others edging toward abstraction. Each square is a microcosm, a fragment of the living world held gently in place.
In these images, I’ve been thinking about the rupture of beauty, how beauty can be a visceral entry point into relationship with the living world. Inspired by Robin Wall Kimmerer’s idea that attention is the beginning of devotion, I use the grid as a structure for sustained looking; an invitation to witness the intricacies of nature. The repetition and fragmentation are not just aesthetic choices; they are ways of making space for reverence.
Beauty, in this context, is not decorative but disruptive, it slows us down, pierces the everyday, and makes us feel. Elaine Scarry writes that beauty “brings copies of itself into being” and compels us toward care. That’s what I’m reaching for: images that evoke tenderness, that cause a slight ache, that seduce the viewer into falling in love with the earth—again, or for the first time. I believe this kind of love is essential in a time of ecological grief. Beauty becomes a threshold, and through it, perhaps, we can move from seeing to sensing, from sensing to belonging, from belonging to protection.
Together, the exhibition traces a dialogue between domestic life and the natural world, inviting viewers to witness the rituals that sustain both and to consider the quiet alchemy of attention, beauty, care, and creativity.