The Cure For Light Update
Visual Art at The Mary Condon Hodgson Art Gallery, Visual and Performing Arts Center
Well hello!
It’s been a little while because I’ve been scurrying to and fro from one project and engagement to the next. All good things.
I’m thrilled to let you all know about the upcoming exhibition of my work at The Mary Condon Hodgson Art Gallery, Visual and Performing Arts Center. The exhibition will be up through March but opening on Saturday March 7th with a reception and I’ll be doing a little talk from 5 to 7 p.m. Here are some details in the image caption, but let me know if you have any questions:
A few more announcements:
I'm also glad to be leading a break-out session on Friday March 6 from 9:15-10:30 a.m. The focus of my session will be about the artist belonging to the edges and the margin, and the danger of being beckoned toward the status quo. The Square Halo Conference is a wonderful event and there are more details HERE:
Last announcement. One of our favorite times of the year is coming, The Breath and The Clay! The Breath & the Clay is a community of artists and creators showcasing beauty, life and wonder through works of art, community and faith.
Each year since 2014, The Breath and the Clay has gathered in Winston Salem, North Carolina for a 3-day experience curated to inspire, challenge and transform your creative and spiritual journey. The event consists of live performances, keynote talks, an immersive art gallery and instructional workshops.
Details HERE.
Now! Onto the meat of it! I wanted to share a few words about my upcoming exhibition, The Cure For Light. Some of this will be reiterated at the coming artist talk but I know a few of you are at a distance from our stretch of the Appalachian Foothills.
THE CURE FOR LIGHT
The details aren’t clear to me, nor to any of my family but when my grandfather was a boy he and some friends got a hold of some fireworks. Through either some misstep or miscalculation one burst in his face. The gulp of light nearly blinded him. The doctor’s prescription was that he was to stay in a room for several weeks which held no light. Sun blotted from sealed windows, switches off, matches hid. I remember my grandfather seeing.
The work in this exhibition takes as its point of departure–at least to some extent– a cultural iteration of the doctor’s prescription. We are, afterall, in the aftermath of a gulp of light that has been detonating for hundreds of years and is so named, The Enlightenment. We have at every turn a blinding effulgence of its repercussions, endless facts, clear axioms, a facility of food and pleasure and knowledge; limitless light.
The way we receive and distribute our information and interactions is still brand new. For centuries and centuries and centuries humanity’s allocation of knowledge and understanding were dispensed through story. Where the proliferated ease of information in our modern age can be compared to staring at an eclipse with sunglasses, a story is a dance between gradations of light and shadow.
And within humanities oeuvre of story, across time and culture there are countless iterations of a similar troupe. One which sets up the metaphoric possibility of my grandfather’s story.
Now, where the circumstances and characters differ, the narrative, if generalized, is the same, wisdom is worked into humanity through difficulty. Moreover, zooming into particulars are story after story of repentance, deepening, or downfall as a result of blindness. Oedipus, Tiresias, Polyphemus, The Blind Salmon of Assaroe, Samson, Tobit, St. Paul, St. Lucy, St. Bridgid, Tarvaa, The Blind Man and the Loon, The Blind Men of the Menominee Tribe, and on and on.
How does all of this imbue the work of this exhibition? There are hints of these stories throughout the images and narratives within the work, however, part of the work vacillates between hinting and alluding. This isn’t because of a desire to be cryptic, but is an allegiance to intuition and association. I’m not as interested in retelling a story as I am allowing the story to work and move within my psyche, to comingle with memory, radiate off of my own ignorance, perturb and caress whatever technical ability and knowledge I may have, link with the olfactory, become chummy with what is withheld even from my own rationality.
What interests me the most is the way that creative work leans away from the type of light exposure that may be damaging. Being a modern person and one in the West I am swimming in the light of Modernity, breathing it in, and have found art-making to be a way of exercising a different type of seeing. Myths, poetry, and painting, and nearly all creative work are a Truth that is not contingent upon fact, and more than that they rely on a kind of seeing that really can’t be described as anything but an inner sight. We court the imagination, are caught up in dalliances with the Muse (who we do not see), we rely on something as breathy and invisible as the wind of Inspiration. We drop a bucket into the darkened world beneath our feet hoping to pull up something to slake our collective thirst.
I hope, if it is within the realm of possibility you will come see the show and will let me know what you think.
Thank you dear reader.
this is really beautiful & inspiring, and I wish I could be there for the art show!