Opening Reception: Friday, October 11 | 5:00 – 8:00
Featuring:
Larassa Kabel | My work for this show is a broad interpretation of what horses have meant to me since I first fell in love with them at 2 years old. Drawing on my history as a fanatical horse girl for 16 years, I am playing with the horse as both a symbol for human conditions and as a historical object of desire. Colored pencil drawings of falling horses become meditations on the trajectory of our lives towards inevitable ends. Collages created from old Horse Illustrated magazines printed on silk explore the puzzling ability for a horse missing large portions of itself to still read reliably as a horse and push into a strange realm of the beautiful and the ugly.
Carolyn Hopkins‘ work illustrates her ongoing relationship with horses, a partnership that becomes performance. Carolyn owns horses and lives in the rural West where she has a front row seat to climate change and the romantic tropes of the American West. She uses her horses in performance pieces that have a level of difficulty invisible to people without experience riding. The Long Surrender is a photograph that documents the final phase of a long process to get her horse Magpie to accept her holding a long, fluttering white flag while riding. As a static image, it is beautiful with Mt. Rainer in the background and a beautiful flush of golden light across the landscape. What is not seen is how Magpie trusts Carolyn enough to overcome her well instinct to flee danger and does not to bolt from this confusing piece of moving fabric attached to her like a predator.
Clayton Porter (b. 1980) is a multimedia artist living and working in the American Southwest. Porter grew up on the front range of Colorado, experiencing rural life and cowboy culture as a child. His current works are mostly autobiographical, with an emphasis on nostalgia and a underlying suggestion of tension and conflict.
Clayton’s tiny, perfect bronc riders on pristine white backgrounds reminded me of my work, but his were symbols for an 8-month affair he’d had with a married woman. The flailing motion of the horse and rider mirror the tension of elation and despair of the relationship, and the diminutive scale of the drawings on large panels, those small points of something against so much nothing, illustrate the power that pain can hold. It feels like a magic trick. How small can that image be and still command our attention? When does the scale tip from noticing to not seeing? How small does the source of our pain have to become before we quit thinking about it?
Jim White | Born with hydrocephalus, Jim White’s life has been profoundly affected by surgery, medical implants, cascading diagnoses, hospitalizations and disability. His practice reenacts the trauma of having tissue surgically removed and medical augments added, but his compositions transform the violence into something smart, funny, offbeat, and playful. “In my life I have felt both as a disabled child and as an artist that I had to adjust myself for others. As a reaction to that I have turned that outwards and changed my surroundings to make sense to me.” Images from art books are cut, torn, recombined, and pinned onto cork board creating dozens of piercings/perforations before the final composition is glued into place. For this show, his interpretation of “horse” ranges from actual images of horses that have been recontextualized to a variety of 2D and 3D objects being smashed together to create an idea of a horse, a surprisingly simple formula that simply requires four legs, a body and a head on a long neck.