Join us for October First Friday!
On view: Craig Cromartie's solo exhibition Far, Dark Places, curated by Marla L. McLeod. We'll also be celebrating the opening of a the pop-up exhibition A Tilt of Light; A Slant of Dust by Joetta Maue in our back room gallery!
About Far, Dark Places
During his time in the prison system, Craig Cromartie found creative ways to occupy his mind. While locked away, Cromartie was able to explore imagined and remembered places, as he sought to transcend the monotony and casual cruelty of America's penal system.
Restricted to supplies available to those incarcerated, Cromartie devised entire worlds of psychedelic surrealism or fantasy melting into abstraction with colored pencils, q-tips, and watercolors, all on painstakingly taped standard sheets of paper.
Making art that symbolically illustrates different periods in his life and their attendant struggles, his images often feature contradictions and opposing forces. Themes of mental health, journeys and decision-making, as well as the battle of good and evil, and the healing power of music, art, and nature, appear repeatedly.
Through it all, the viewer and the tableaux are often under surveillance, through a pervasive all-seeing eye, seemingly observing both artist and viewer.
About A Tilt of Light; A Slant of Dust
This exhibition by Joetta Maue considers how time becomes perceptible through sustained attention. The installation brings together a large-scale drawing of the sun’s surface, marked by solar flares and hand-colored ink; drawings from Dust and Cosmos, which transform camera-less photographs of dust and sweepings gathered from the home into cosmic landscapes; everyday objects including a leaf, a rock, and a watch; and prisms that catch and redirect light through the space.
Together, the works move between intimate and vast scales of time: the settling of dust, a fallen leaf, measured time, geological time, and the ongoing movement of the sun. Rather than attempting to represent or capture time, the exhibition creates conditions for noticing its presence through repetition, transformation, accumulation, movement, and sustained looking.