Foley Gallery is pleased to present Other Nature, a group exhibition featuring artists Amy Casey, Janelle Lynch, Jeremy Stenger, and Brooks Salzwedel. With a hybrid of different mediums, the exhibition examines four distinct views of Nature and the artist's relationship and connection to it.
Amy Casey finds the balance between urban living and Nature with her paintings of miniature homes residing in nurturing tree stumps and lush fields of mushrooms. For years, Casey painted precariously balanced cityscapes, tightly detailed with each brick and windowpane rendered precisely. Her most recent work calls upon her experience at a Finnish forest residency, where she would lose her way in the abundance of Nature. City architecture seemed endless in her prior work, columns of stacked houses climbing vertically, endlessly, up and out of the frame. In the four paintings we include, her modest homes are resettled in a more hospitable neighborhood, surrounded by the forest's cuddling of wet grass, wood, and warmth.
In her series, Another Way of Looking at Love (2015-2018), Janelle Lynch defines ways to photograph the thick underbrush of untamed land, exploring the interconnectedness of Nature's offerings and the example they may set for our human relationships. A deeply rooted spiritual connection blossoms when we see our place in the world she shares with us. Seeking out visual connections between the same and different plant and tree species, Lynch finds gesture, touch, and fellowship in what might be perceived as randomness. When these lines and spaces come together, they invite, opening a point of entry to discover how guided they are. Her deep color, backed with bathing light, brings attention to the overlooked workings of Mother Nature. The elements of leaf, twig, berry, and branch unify in a supportive environment acting as a metaphor for the communities we can create regardless of our sameness or differences.
Brooks Salzwedel's work brings light to our unnatural interventions in otherwise pristine wilderness. Using a self-created process involving graphite, resin, tape, colored pencil, and ink, his work evokes feelings of desolation through haunted, dreamlike visions of otherworldly terrains. The images are often softened by mylar, calling attention to the trees and land's silhouette while hiding the details of our unnatural impact on the land. Geometric enclosures often isolate and "box" the land, looking at how we commodify it for our pleasure. As often the case, the trees and wild will not be tamed, repeatedly puncturing this enclosure, exploring a return to the freedom of their natural state.
Jeremy Stenger's paintings bring us deep into the thick of lush petals, weaving tendrils, plump berries, and cleverly hidden insects. We see no end or opening to his dense mapping of Nature. We are in it, below us and above us. His near monochromatic palette keeps us from distinguishing the brilliant colors that we might imagine to exist. This equalizes each element's contributions, accentuating the outlines, mapping our way through the composition; follow a line, and bending with a leaf, going north around a berry's rotary, and ending up on the tip of the wing of a butterfly. Like walking through a forest at night, our eyes slowly adjust to the compositions revealing whispers of hues; yellow and lavender puffs hint at colors once there, perhaps returning in a different season.
Other Nature is on view through February 28th, 2021. Foley Gallery is open Wednesday through Saturday, 11 – 5:30 pm and Sunday, 12 - 5. To request images, please contact the gallery at hello@foleygallery.com.