WILD NARRATIVES
On View March 18, 2022 - May 7, 2022
Each season carries its own beauty, and as we move forward into the year, Spring is blooming in the gallery! Referring to nature in a broad sense, these 6 artists find flourishing inspiration as they search for home, heart, and solace. These works reflect upon Spring and nature’s ever-changing beauty, engaging memory, a sense of place, and reminding us of our interconnectedness. Through sculpture, photography, oil painting and mixed media, the artists in WILD NARRATIVES address concepts of abundance, persistence, belonging, evolution, and experimentation.
This group exhibition features the work of SAMMY LEE, ANGELA BELOIAN, KEVIN HOTH, MEAGEN SVENDSEN, DON QUADE and GAVIN BENJAMIN
Press Release (pdf)
Price List (pdf)
MEAGEN SVENDSEN presents a body of work about empathy depletion and the sources for renewal found in the wild. “Dawn Chorus at Dusk” is an installation of ceramic sound waves translated from field recordings Svendsen collected in the woods of Colorado and the jungle of Nayarit, Mexico. This series seeks to poetically represent the ways in which nature binds to our heart and emotions.
KEVIN HOTH approaches the embedded chroma of flowers as a place of worship, a respite for his soul. In his art work, he renders these life forms with varied approaches; some violent and hallucinatory, others slow and reliant upon the Polaroid medium to transfer their fleeting beauty.
DON QUADE’s love of nature and gardening has led him to explore the shapes, textures, colors, and all aspects of the organic form, transforming these elements into paintings. He strives to create a sense of feeling that transcends more than the visual but engages the sense of memory as well. Quade’s recent series is inspired by experimentation with color combinations, contrasting organic forms, hard-edged graphic shapes, and different senses of proportion and perspective in order to achieve impactful compositions.
Learning through observation in her garden, ANGELA BELOIAN takes inspiration from the growth and evolution of life into her studio. Utilizing the canvas as a cosmos for the germination of ideas, she first paints small studies while things are in bloom and releases her imagination in the dormant months to create these fantastical works. Each painting is a bursting microcosm rich with interconnectedness, symbiosis, and interdependence.
In the studio, SAMMY LEE arranges chaotic bits and pieces to realize a whole. Her work transforms and re-contextualizes familiar items into art objects that reflect her personal history. Lee’s “Paper Skins” are the result of laborious and cathartic handmade paper work, transforming the material into a leather-like substrate that is resilient yet luminous. These works question sociocultural issues surrounding a sense of belonging, home, the foreign body, cross cultural psychology, and immigration.
Sammy Lee Price List (pdf)
Presenting cinematic compositions, GAVIN BENJAMIN’s “Old World Luxuries” are not photographic studies, but rather investigations and experiments with the goal to compel emotion in the viewer. Utilizing medium format negatives and building layers upon layers, each piece is informed by the history of art, photography, and pop culture, resulting in a hand-touched baroque tapestry of mixed mediums sealed in lacquer to create a sensual, dreamy picture.