UPCOMING EVENTS
MAY
- May 16th, 2024 - Lecture
- May 25th - August 25th , 2024 - Exhibition
Exhibition Statement
Quietude
A desert reveals its hidden life - its flora and fauna and histories - only to the still and attentive. Like the high desert where both artists live, Robert King’s ceramics and Boramie Sao’s paintings insist on contemplative pausing. Inspired by Northern New Mexico, each artist translates the clarity of objects under arid skies. Exploring psychic and physical landscapes, Sao paints abstract shapes and sparseness, and teases out meaning through her titles. To expose the rawness of her linen canvases, she keeps her oils ‘thin’. King too embraces rawness, expressed in texture and weight, or the unedited emotion of clay. Employing wild clays, he celebrates the pops and bruises that occur while firing. He pushes ceramics to the edge of function and into the domain of psychology: what would anxiety look like if it were a vessel? Without falling into representation, his recent work is creaturely. The effect is subtle and gestural: almost-bodies. Look closely: some of King’s pots have clavicles. The exhibition title, Quietude, invites the contemplative pause, both in the artistic process and the mode of reception. Quietude is not a meek disposition: a whisper can counter noise and speak against the violence of silencing. Both artists have inherited a history of oppressive silencing - Sao’s family fled Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and King is a Choctaw, Native American. One hears the command to listen in their title, Quietude. One also hears the desert, where without time and attention, we ‘scud across its surface.’ Quietude is an invitation to step into the depths.
- May 31st - June 21st , 2024 - Exhibition
Curatorial Statement
Beyond Landscape: from the Galisteo Basin
Land is not landscape, nor a view from a window. From microscopic organisms to weather systems to ancient and contemporary human habitation, it is ultimately relational. In Beyond Landscape: from the Galisteo Basin, resident Galisteo artists express their relationship to place and space. Using local mud, sand and seeds, Judy Tuwaletstiwa explores the weight, texture and dimensionality of the Galisteo River bosque, and her glass creations hover on the liminal cusp where sand becomes translucent and earth reflects light. Ceramicist Robert King sources wild clay from nearby arroyos and gathers and hand-grinds rocks, sand and minerals to create what he describes as “a love letter to the high desert”. The desert enters Stephen Davis’s work as spatial and temporal distance between brushstrokes and objects, where the human is both integral and absent, often implied by an empty chair, constructed of negative space. Janice Wall’s industrial structures defy our expectations: what should be solid and imposing is subservient to the space that shapes it. Her buildings appear to float, subside or surrender in and to the air, and traces of time and natural forces interface with toxic, acidic erosion, created by the application of hay and sand while printing. Shaun Gilmore’s sculptures conjure the dance of organic processes, and their interpretative range reflects the interpenetrating scope of ecosystems. Her suspended papier- mâché sculptures remind of cholla growing, Spring winds and cellular differentiation. In her colorful plastic streamers, we hear and see the rain, and our delight conjoins dismay, which, in its best expression becomes the drive toward stewardship, for plastic rain implies the pollutants that contemporary civilisation brings to the Galisteo Basin.
Beyond Landscape: from the Galisteo Basin is produced by Galisteo Arts and curated by Galisteo resident, Dennison Smith, novelist and founder of The Baldwin Gallery and Curatorial Team in London, England.
PAST EVENTS
- April 11th, 2024 - Lecture