Spring Exhibition Opening! Ilana Manolson – Time: In the Mountains & Menagerie of Disappearance

Ilana Manolson – Time: In the Mountains Time:

In the Mountains strives to capture the different heartbeats of the earth over time, observed by Ilana Manolson while painting, hiking, and working in the Rocky Mountains. A distinguished painter, printmaker, and naturalist who has been shown in galleries throughout North America, Manolson combines her talents here to create visually confounding and expansive works that unfurl like rivers, trails, and scrolls. Unrolling to reveal the story as it goes, these scrolls effectively use the layering of mediums and materials to create a visual narrative for the viewer to follow. The only repeated detail lies in painted marks embedded in the work that act as a kind of EKG-like rhythm depicting the heartbeat of the Earth. Based on the Schumann Resonance, a magnetic tone found in Earth’s ionosphere, this heartbeat has recently started to increase in pace, indicating to Manolson that damage is being done to the Earth’s health. Using these marks and pools of paint to transform landscapes into equivalencies of tenacious life in which some species thrive and others disappear, Manolson manipulates the fluidity of her medium and it becomes a metaphor for the resurgence and the dying. She celebrates the natural world and its ineffable mysteries, even as we are aware of potential disasters. Even in the coming apart, there is great beauty.

Menagerie of Disappearance

The Menagerie of Disappearance unites four unique artists, each employing diverse mediums to explore a common theme. Through photography, textiles, sculpture, and drawing, these artists provoke contemplation of our evolving environment. With an international presence, they join together to collectively narrate the tale of our troubled relationships with the creatures and environments around us. Highlighting the tension between perceived life and what is lifeless through a series of taxidermy raptors, Eva Brandl showcases photographic work honed over a forty-year career. Brandl invites viewers to parse out hinted narratives in her work that she’s sown through the use of staged backgrounds and forced perspectives. Jude Griebel’s monolithic towers of miniatures are complex structures that serve to highlight themes of waste, excess, and lived experiences balanced against the obvious amount of time and care needed to create each creature. His attention to detail and the size of each work invite closer scrutiny by viewers to identify the individual within the mass. Tamara Kostianovsky transforms repurposed textiles into sculptural carcasses, drawing lines between consumerism, fast fashion, and the relationships between humans and animals. Currently based in New York, Kostianovsky has been creating textile sculptures that delicately walk the line between engaging and shocking for twenty years. Inspired by the private collections housed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Lorraine Simms has created a series of highly detailed and beautifully haunting graphite drawings of shadows cast by the skulls and bones of endangered animals.