Nothing Comes Out of the Ground Straight
An exhibition about tilling and nurturing: the inevitable destruction before and after the abundance.
Seeds are organic fetal little bits of things, pushing with all their might against a harsh meniscus of firm dirt. Do they get any credit for that push? Nothing Comes Out of the Ground Straight underscores the cyclical in experience. Easy and hard, good and bad, old and young, ugly and beautiful, getting from one to the other is all about the process in between. The works included in this exhibition all explore interstices along that journey in the human experience through figuration.
Using the figure as a placeholder for larger, lengthier narratives is a tradition that goes back to the beginning of our collective creativity. The Jomon pottery from Japan, the oldest form of ceramic, dates back to possibly even the 14th millennium BCE. The Jomon works include clay figurines called dogu (pronounced dough-goo). Many agree dogu were talismen for good health or safe childbirth. Of course the figure, particularly that of a woman, has often been connected to issues of birth. With the Earth itself culturally referred to as a Mother, art criticism often extrapolates to issues of the feminine whenever the fecund is mentioned. This exhibit looks to go far beyond the essentialist take on abundance, by navigating the full intergenerational experience of us all.
Artists: Kristin Calabrese, Tibbie Dunbar, Olga Koumoundouros, Carole Frances Lung, Siobhan McClure, Naida Osline, Nancy Popp, Amy Sarkisian, Anne Elizabeth Sobieski, Kim Tucker, and Alexandra Wiesenfeld
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opening night, with works by Olga Koumoundouros, Nancy Popp, Kim Tucker, Anne-Elizabeth Sobieski |
