October 2 - 27, 2019
Opening Reception
Friday, October 4, 6 pm - 8:30 pm
Nancy Diessner
“All I want is to be the river though I return
again and again to the clouds”
Julia Talcott
“On the Night You Were Born”
Gary Duehr
“Aureoles”
Nancy Diessner
Nancy Diessner
“All I want is to be the river though I return
again and again to the clouds”
My interest is in the sliver of space between the sky and the water, between open air and surface tension, between the solidity and firmness of the earth and the mysterious, unknowable, impermanent depths of dark river water. I’m interested in the way a body and a boat can glide, as one, along that water line, and also—somehow—transcend it. I’m interested in how a boat, a body, water, and sky can mean so much more than what’s there.
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The 3-dimensional forms of these artworks are cast from parts of my single rowing shell—a very long, almost impossibly thin, boat for sculling. These boat forms are filled with and are surrounded by etchings of bodies and water and riverbanks that relate physically and emotionally to a liminal state between the fixed and knowable and the impermanent and unknowable.
I’m at my most focused, raw, and open-hearted when I pierce through the spaces between air and water when I scull, and I find myself in the discomfort of liminal spaces, sculling on the surface of a dark river surrounded by the unknown. The relation of the bright air and the dark water to our conscious and unconscious minds seems more than metaphorical, it seems palpable—the dark river obscures shapes and memories and experiences hidden in it and the light of air, of consciousness, seems to tell us that all there is is what we see clearly around us (no dark river; no unconscious motivations or mysteries). Where the unconscious and the conscious worlds meet is changeable and charged.
Exhibition title is a line from the poem "Time to be the fine line of light" by Carrie Fountain.*
Julia Talcott
Julia Talcott
“On the Night You Were Born”
My work reflects my interest in the natural world. Natural and man-made patterns fascinate me. Observing, pulling apart, and re-imagining them as printed pieces I reprocess them as linoleum and woodblock prints. My vocabulary of images is worked intuitively back into collage and new forms or constructions. I alternate between abstraction and representational images, with color and black and white pallets, weaving them together in a way that hopes to express the vitality of growth and decay in a physical and spiritual world.
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In this show ecstatic nature is abstracted into pattern: emerging, expanding, exploding and expiring. My title is a shout-out to a favorite painting, Paul Gaughin’s masterpiece at the MFA: “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?. These are the most fundamental questions of human expression. I find that the search is its’ own reward.
Gary Duehr
Gary Duehr
“Aureoles”
With their radiant circles, these images of refuse evoke the aureoles (diminutive of Latin aurea, "golden") or
halos in paintings of sacred figures. In Christian paintings, a luminous cloud envelops the whole body or just
the head, where it would appear as a round halo or nimbus—a kind of crown.
These photographs of trash bins, however, look down instead of up, toward the earthy, random debris at our feet.
They are closer to profane than sacred.
Pigment prints in round white frames, 20" x 20".