‘Primordial Forms’ exhibit opens at The Phoenix
July 17, 2025 | By Waterbury Roundabout 
A new art exhibition at The Phoenix Gallery & Music Hall opens tonight with a reception and runs through Oct. 19.
“Primordial Forms” presents the work of three artists – Cynthia Kirkwood, Terry Ekasala and Grace Degennaro. The show is guest curated by Kirkwood, a Montpelier painter and Bermuda native, who invited fellow artists Ekasala and DeGennaro to exhibit their work alongside hers.
Kirkwood shares that, throughout her life, inspirations have come to her in dreams. “Usually colors and images come in directly,” she says. Since she was 10, she says she has received a form of visual language through automatic drawing, painting in a state of “no-mind,” from dreams and also directly from plants, trees and flowers. Forms and compositions become their own objects, she says, such as mysterious seeds, doorways, keys, and offerings, channeling their own beneficial energy.
Ekasala was born in Weymouth, Massachusetts, and graduated from the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. In 1983, she set up her first studio at the Clay Hotel and Youth Hostel in the art deco world of Miami Beach. Part of her expression included being part of a band of graffiti artists whose work on abandoned buildings was featured in the Miami Herald used in advertising campaigns. In 1987, Ekasala moved to Paris and eventually joined the colorful 20th Arrondissement at La Forge, a diverse artistic community that organized the first artist squat or reclaimed studio space to become legal in Paris. Her style evolved from figurative to abstract and her work went on view in Paris, Berlin and New York.
In 2001, Ekasala moved to Vermont and today she lives in East Burke, where she creates large and small abstract paintings in what she calls her “dream studio,” looking out at a nearby mountainside. Her work has been exhibited at Catamount Arts in St. Johnsbury and Burlington Center for the Arts. In recent years she also has shown work at the Metalstone Gallery in New York City, Matter & Light in Boston, and the Piermarq Gallery in Sydney, Australia. DeGennaro was born in Rockville Centre, New York and her paintings and works on paper have been widely exhibited from the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland, Maine, to the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College in, Saratoga Springs, New York; galleries across New York state have shown her work as well as U.S. embassies in Qatar and Tanzania.
She received an MFA in painting and sculpture from Columbia University and a BS in fine arts from Skidmore College.
Her work is part of permanent collections at the Heckscher Museum in Huntington, New York, the Gund Collection in Boston, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. She has spent time as a visiting artist at Bowdoin, Colby and Skidmore colleges and this fall, she will be in residence at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Connecticut. DeGennaro lives and works in Yarmouth, Maine.
In announcing the exhibition, gallery owner Joseph Pensak said, “This work radiates transcendent liminal energy from the sacred posture of receiver and received.”
Tonight’s reception is free to attend and runs from 6 to 8 p.m. with live music by composer Kyle Saulnier. More information is online at thephoenixvt.com.