Becoming A Field

Kim Altomare
Lexi Arrietta
Zoe Cohen
Daisy Diamond
Claire Downes
Jim Strong

November 2 – November 23, 2024

Second Thursday Artist Reception: November 14th, 6-9pm

Gallery hours: Saturdays 12-5pm and by appointment

“We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages.. The world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds.“ – Benjamin Lee Whorf

“If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.” – Agnès Varda

The six artists in “Becoming A Field” survey territories – psychic, imagined, and remembered – to source the symbolic imagery which shapes their personal mythopoetic narratives. The landscape here reflects aspects of self: bound in nets, lost in fields or the wilderness, decaying, overgrown, shrouded in mystery and secrecy. Body, mind, and spirit are mined as sites of growth, trauma, transience, and healing.

Organic forms stand in as self-portraits or snapshots of inner states: rainbow, sun and moon, moths and butterflies, webs and coral, nests, ferns, flowers, and fungi. Memories and observations of the natural world shift and collide in works which inhabit their own liminal realm and operate with their own logic.

Even the human-made structures and objects – a house, a ferris wheel – are mottled, shaped, and warped by hand to reflect a childlike sense of play, a dark fairytale influence – or to indicate the long passage of time. Crusty gates warp and distort, a braid tangles around an anchor, turkey tail mushrooms cluster on a child’s swimsuit.

Exhibiting these works together – born of individual narratives – creates interstices of relatedness – a widened psychic vista; a navigable field of universal associations, symbols and language.

“Becoming A Field” asks how do we embody landscapes? What shapes do our exiled energies take over time, what forgotten parts of ourselves are buried, wandering, or lost, what relics remain to be excavated from our deeper wounds?

“The landscape in which identity is supposed to be grounded is not solid stuff; it’s made out of memory and desire.” – Rebecca Solnit
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Kim Altomare investigates the shifting dimensions of the trans body and seeks to redefine abstraction as a field of trans possibilities; the show title “Becoming A Field” is taken from their work on paper in the exhibit.

Lexi Arrietta creates thorny, dilapidated objects – a combination of the organic and manmade – meant to evoke the feeling of stumbling upon something uncanny yet innately recognizable in the woods, fields, and waterways.

Zoe Cohen explores origins and beginnings within ecosystems, pulling mysterious symbols from traces left visible from layers of the past.

Daisy Diamond creates sculptures and paintings about the relationships between objects, decay, and the subtleties of memory. Informed by their study of the condition and care of material culture within the field of art conservation, Daisy creates objects that resist categorization and emphasize the accumulation of meaning over time

Claire Downes constructs hypnotic compositions that allude to spiritual symbolism and a narrative of growing up queer in the Deep South. Truncated rainbows reference queerness as a physical space. Multicolored lines create visual density; hybrid paint-objects move into and out of the viewer’s space.

Jim Strong conjures a discreet world-building with desperate allusions to the artist’s faith and confusions. His work forgoes traditional mark-making to focus on the effects of time and evaporation. The results allude to spiritual abstraction but also feel as a system, like some alternative universe of early photographic/alchemical production.

Curated by Kimi Pryor