TAG | THE ART GALLERY PRESENTS: DEVOTION – Press Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 

TAG | The Art Gallery Presents: DEVOTION 

A Two-Person Exhibition by Michael Bourque and Derrick Te Paske 

OCTOBER 2 – NOVEMBER 1 

Opening Reception: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2ND 5PM TO 9PM 

TAG | The Art Gallery | 450C Harrison Avenue, Boston, MA 

BOSTON, MA — What does it mean to give something your attention—not for a moment, but for years? To return to the same material, the same gesture, the same questions, and still find something new? 

TAG | The Art Gallery presents DEVOTION, a two-person exhibition by Michael Bourque and Derrick Te Paske, two accomplished artists whose practices are dramatically different in material and form, yet connected by something deeply human: an enduring commitment to making. 

People have occasionally described both artists as “obsessive.” Bourque and Te Paske see it differently. 

“We prefer to think that we are dedicated, passionate and persistent, sometimes even fervent and zealous. And we decided that the best and most appropriate word, for this show, is devotion.” 

That distinction sits at the heart of the exhibition. 

Obsession suggests compulsion. Devotion suggests choice. It is attention willingly given, to an idea, a material, a person, a place, a practice. It is returning to something because, after all these years, it still matters. 

And for Bourque and Te Paske, it clearly does. 

MICHAEL BOURQUE: BUILDING WORLDS 

Before Michael Bourque constructs a painting, he has spent a lifetime constructing spaces. A painter, photographer and nationally recognized commercial interior designer, Bourque has contributed to many of Boston’s defining corporate environments, from work involving the first tenants in the John Hancock Tower to headquarters and offices for Fidelity Investments,

Wellington Management, Cabot Corporation and Biogen. Throughout his design career, he has thought about architecture, movement, proportion, color, functionality and how many individual elements can successfully inhabit a shared space. 

Look at his paintings and that history begins to reveal itself. Geometry provides an underlying architecture. Diagonals, grids and parallel sections divide the canvas into territories that can suggest floor plans, buildings or city streets. Then Bourque begins to complicate the order. 

Color arrives. And then more color. Repeated marks accumulate across the surface. Thick applications of paint sit over earlier layers. Unexpected combinations collide. Individual forms gather into groups, separate, reconnect and begin again. 

From across the room, there is pattern and structure. Move closer and the individuality of each gesture becomes apparent. Repetition is never truly repetition. Sculptor and Artscope contributor Madeleine Lord has observed in Bourque’s paintings a recurring theme of “the coexistence of the many in a shared place, where individual story is as important as the full collection.” It is difficult not to see something deeply human in that idea. 

A Bourque painting can resemble a city: hundreds of individual presences occupying the same territory, each maintaining its identity while contributing to something larger. Some elements align; others stand apart. Boundaries emerge and dissolve. What initially appears systematic becomes surprisingly personal. 

Boston itself is part of Bourque’s visual vocabulary. An avid walker, he moves through the city observing the dialogue between historic brick and stone structures and contemporary towers of metal and glass. Buildings rise beside one another across generations, the new entering into conversation with what came before. 

His paintings operate similarly. They are constructed worlds in which difference is not eliminated in pursuit of harmony. Difference is what creates the energy. Bourque’s professional life as a designer has been devoted to creating spaces in which people can function together. His paintings seem to ask a related but more poetic question: How do many individual things occupy the same space and remain themselves? 

There is also tremendous joy in the answer. His paintings may be carefully structured, but they are never imprisoned by their systems. There is abundance, humor and pleasure in them. Bourque allows himself to improvise within the architecture he creates. 

His life, too, is composed of many roles: artist, designer, photographer, chef, grandfather, friend, and a steadfast caretaker and advocate for his quadriplegic son. His paintings are not illustrations of these experiences, but something of the philosophy behind them seems to

resonate through the work: individual elements matter, relationships matter, and somehow the many must find a way to coexist within the whole. 

For all the discipline required to produce these intricate surfaces, Bourque is still clearly playing. 

That, too, is devotion. 

DERRICK TE PASKE: THE BEAUTY OF THE UNNECESSARY 

If Bourque constructs worlds through accumulation, Derrick Te Paske begins with matter itself. Wood. 

Something that has already lived before it reaches the artist’s hands. For 32 years, Te Paske was a professor at Framingham State University, immersed in media studies, theoretical principles and digital methods of production and reproduction. His sculptural practice developed in purposeful contrast to that world. 

His work is tangible. Physical. Slow. Singular. There is no copy and paste. There is a piece of wood, a tool, a pair of hands, and time. That relationship with making began long before academia. Growing up in rural Iowa, Te Paske loved making things with his hands. Decades later, he describes the pleasure as much the same as it was when he was a boy. What has changed is his understanding of what that act can mean. Working by hand has become, for him, ecological, therapeutic and even redemptive. 

Looking at his sculptures, the evidence of that attention is everywhere. Some are smooth and sensuous. Others are punctured, incised or covered with seemingly countless marks. Natural grain becomes part of the composition rather than something to conceal. Certain forms recall 

vessels, artifacts or objects whose purposes have been lost to history; others possess an almost human personality. 

They can be elegant and strange, serious and funny, ancient and entirely contemporary. Te Paske summarizes his interests simply: “classical forms, the ancient, the so-called primitive, and the strange.” 

His work connects him to something much older than contemporary art: the long human history of making objects by hand. He speaks of feeling part of a creative continuum stretching back to our earliest ancestors and of his kinship with generations of artists and artisans across cultures who made things “more carefully crafted and beautiful than they really needed to be.” 

That idea becomes central to DEVOTION.

Why make something more beautiful than it needs to be? Why spend hours altering a surface that was already beautiful? Why carve, polish, perforate and refine an object that may have no practical function whatsoever? 

Te Paske has a wonderfully contrarian phrase for it: “Inefficiency in the pursuit of the unnecessary.” 

In a culture increasingly preoccupied with productivity, speed and efficiency, there is something quietly defiant about such an idea. Art does not have to save time. 

It can consume it. It can ask someone to spend an unreasonable number of hours making something whose only purpose may be to make us look, wonder, smile or feel. 

When a student once asked Te Paske what one of his sculptures was for, he replied: “It’s to keep anything else in the known universe from occupying that space.” The answer is funny, but beneath the humor is a serious defense of art. Something does not have to be useful to have value. 

Sometimes beauty is enough. Sometimes curiosity is enough. Sometimes making is enough.

WHEN TIME BECOMES VISIBLE 

This is where Michael Bourque and Derrick Te Paske meet. Not in material. Not in style. Not even necessarily in intention. They meet in time. 

Stand close to one of Bourque’s paintings and consider every individual decision involved in its creation, the underlying geometry, the layers, the color relationships, the repeated marks, the interruptions, the moment when one color demanded another. 

Then stand before one of Te Paske’s sculptures. Follow the grain. Notice the incisions. Look at the hundreds of perforations across a surface. Imagine the turning, carving, sanding, polishing and handling required before the object reached this state. 

Imagine the hours. That may be the quiet heart of DEVOTION. 

We live at a moment when so much of life is accelerating. Images appear and disappear in seconds. Objects can be reproduced endlessly. Technology increasingly promises to shorten processes, eliminate effort and make production more efficient. 

Bourque and Te Paske offer another experience. Their work contains the evidence of time willingly spent.

Neither artist seems particularly interested in finding the shortest distance between an idea and its completion. Instead, they linger. They repeat. They reconsider. They add another mark. They make the thing more complicated, more considered, perhaps more beautiful than it strictly needs to be. And they keep going. Not because anyone asked them to. Because they care. 

DEVOTION AS A WAY OF LIVING 

Ultimately, DEVOTION reaches beyond the studio. We recognize devotion because most of us have given it somewhere: to another person, to a child, to a relationship, to a profession, to a place, to an idea, to a craft, or simply to something we have cared about long enough that caring for it has become part of who we are. 

Devotion is rarely one grand gesture. More often, it is repetition. Showing up. Paying attention. Doing something again when no one is watching. Making the hundredth mark with as much care as the first. 

Bourque and Te Paske have lived very different creative lives, but both have spent decades making, observing, questioning and refining. Perhaps what is most moving is that experience has not exhausted their curiosity. 

There is still humor. There is still experimentation. There is still surprise. There is still joy. They are still making. Still wondering. Still playing. Still devoted. 

DEVOTION celebrates two artists, but it also celebrates something fundamental about the creative life: the decision to continue caring about something long after the novelty has disappeared. Perhaps devotion is simply love measured in time. And in the work of Michael Bourque and Derrick Te Paske, time becomes visible. 

ABOUT MICHAEL BOURQUE 

Michael Bourque is a painter, photographer and commercial interior designer whose distinguished design career has included work within many of Boston’s major corporate and architectural environments. His paintings emerge from the intersection of art and design, combining geometry, abstraction, repetition and improvisation through layered color and richly worked surfaces. 

Bourque’s work has been described by ARTisSpectrum Magazine as a “thought provoking mixture of abstraction, repetition, and improvisation.” His paintings are immediately recognizable for their dense visual rhythms, exuberant palettes and the small variations that continually disrupt their underlying patterns.

ABOUT DERRICK TE PASKE 

Derrick Te Paske is a sculptor and Professor Emeritus of the Communication Arts Department at Framingham State University, where he taught for 32 years. His earlier creative career encompassed photography, documentary filmmaking and other media before his sculptural practice increasingly centered on wood and physical, low-tech methods of making. 

His work has been exhibited extensively throughout New England, including at the Newport Art Museum, Fuller Craft Museum, Attleboro Arts Museum, ArtsWorcester, Concord Art and TAG | The Art Gallery. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Peabody Essex Museum and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and has appeared in American Woodturner and 500 Wood Bowls. 

ABOUT TAG | THE ART GALLERY 

TAG | The Art Gallery, an exhibition space of the New England Art Center, is an artist-centered contemporary gallery located in Boston’s SoWa Art + Design District. TAG is committed to lowering barriers between artists and audiences, creating meaningful opportunities for living artists, and making contemporary art more approachable through exhibitions, conversations, education and community engagement. 

VIEWING ROOM available on ARTSY.net 

TAG | The Art Gallery 

450C Harrison Avenue, Unit C2 

Boston, MA 02118 

Contact 

Claudia Fiks 

claudia@newenglandartcenter.com 

774-551-6824 

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