NEW CANAAN, CT, Jan. 22, 2022—Silvermine Arts Center welcomes 22 new members to its Guild of Artists with the New Members Exhibition, presenting an expansive survey of contemporary works. These new members join a long line of Guild artists, many of whom are luminaries with work in major museums and private collections. The exhibition is an opportunity to showcase the Guild’s new and emerging artists and to make their work available to both the experienced and the first-time collector. The New Members Exhibition is on view at the Silvermine Galleries from Jan. 22 to Feb. 25.The artwork from these new members offers a fresh view so desperately needed right now—given the current political and social climate. Suzanna Levy presents two works from her series “Trees: A Study in Color.” The series allows viewers to enter a realm of abstraction, in which they can contemplate their own visual experience. Brian Whelan emphasizes the importance of storytelling by exploring ways to retell a familiar narrative. Whelan’s piece Flotsam Jetsam depicts his experience immigrating to the U.S. from Ireland and the overwhelming feeling of displacement in a new environment. Tom Matt, the grand-prize winner of Silvermine’s 71st A•ONE Exhibition, presents a series of paintings that reflect on anxiety, hope, and the passage of time. In Matt’s words, the project “combines my mature aesthetic expression with early memories. These paintings capture time within time. They represent an emotive meeting of two selves separated by decades.” Tom Atwood provides a narrative of the LGBTQA+ experience in the USA in his series “Kings & Queens in Their Castles.” “When navigating such a heteronormative world, the art that reflects it can fail to represent, or in other instances, create an ‘othering,’” Atwood writes. To combat this, his images portray whimsical, intimate moments of daily life that shift between the pictorial and the theatrical. Atwood’s photographs retain a level of subversion and define their own terms of representation.