Opening Date: December 2, 2022
Closing Date: January 28, 2023
Reception: December 2, 2022, 6:00 – 9:00 pm
Curator: Anne Allen
Artists: Rachel Barminski Bounds; Janet Chaffee; Dan Jian
Exhibition Statement:
“Go and sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything,” Abba Moses, as recounted by Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
“The simpler the moment in front of you the more anxious I become. I could be doing something, I should be doing something. But a life under constant threat of novelty isn’t a life; it’s exhaustion. …I give myself the chance to remember that this is wrong—that most of life is ordinary; that ordinary isn’t the enemy but instead something nourishing and unavoidable, the bedrock upon which the rest of experience ebbs and flows.” - Mike Powell, from Washing Dishes, The New York Times Magazine
“The secret of seeing is, then, the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all. But although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought.” - Annie Dillard, from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Delving into and reveling in the intimacy of the ordinary and the everyday, peering into the small and revealing what would otherwise be unseen; communing with nature, these are some of the activities/ways of seeing embodied by the work I am proposing for this exhibition. Extraordinarily beautiful, frequently black and white and often dark in tone, these works in drawing and painting by two Texas artists (one of whom now lives in Santa Fe New Mexico) and one artist based in Brooklyn, New York (whose work I have followed since we were in graduate school together), are works that-- regardless of when they were created--speak to me of things I need to listen to today.
Collectively, these works capture a turning inwards, a meditation on, a scrutiny of what goes unnoticed in our daily lives. They are a lesson in paying close attention, seeing what is before us if we will only look. Whether we are indoors or outside, in our homes, our backyard or on the Continental Divide. Here even poppies are filled with anxiety and a feverish energy, nature is reflected back from the stillest and smallest of precious objects, and the mountains beneath our feet are broken down into their most basic patterns and substances, revealing the extraordinary in their composition.
“I just need a little more time, because I am going to Love the things as no one has thought to love them, until they’re real and worthy of you.” - From On Darkening Ground, by Rainer Maria Rilke
Price
- FREE!
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