“In a world myriad as ours, the gaze is a singular act: to look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

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MATERIALIST II features new paintings, drawings, and sculptures by six artists; Jessie Fisher, Melanie Johnson, Kathy Liao, Christopher Lowrance, Michael McCaffrey, and Scott Seebart are all local artists and educators devoted to perceptual painting, material exploration, and the physicality of their media. Collectively, the members of this group explore the phenomenological and the material while simultaneously employing the practice of making as a responsive vehicle for invention and a forum for reflection.

The work in this exhibition highlights each artist’s respective devotion to sustaining a poetic mediation between the directly observed, the recounted, and the re-presented, often via painstakingly meticulous, labor-intensive, or counterintuitive approaches. Close inspection of the work reveals individual methodologies that are far from direct, indicative of conscious parameters concretized while engaging with the meditative process of making.

 

Choices of subject are deliberate; the psychological, the familial, the ecological and the overlooked come together as icons signifying each artist's insight whose full impact is revealed to viewers willing to spend time unpacking process as a function of meaning. The making of the subject is the subject's personification. This devotion is emblematic of a specific kind of intimacy, demonstrated through the artists’ engagement with material and subject simultaneously, hinting at a proxy for intellectual and emotional connections rather than material as a mere means of representation.