Kim Altomare

Lexi Arrietta

Zoe Cohen

Daisy Diamond

Claire Downes

Jim Strong

“We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages… The world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds.“ – Benjamin Lee Whorf

“If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.” – Agnès Varda

The six artists in Becoming A Field survey territories – psychic, imagined, and remembered – to source the symbolic imagery which shapes their personal mythopoetic narratives. The landscape here reflects aspects of self: bound in nets, lost in fields or the wilderness, decaying, overgrown, shrouded in mystery and secrecy. Body, mind, and spirit are mined as sites of growth, trauma, transience, and healing.

Organic forms stand in as self-portraits or snapshots of inner states: rainbow, sun and moon, moths and butterflies, webs and coral, nests, ferns, flowers, and fungi. Memories and observations of the natural world shift and collide in works which inhabit their own liminal realm and operate with their own logic.

Even the human-made structures and objects – a house, a ferris wheel – are mottled, shaped, and warped by hand to reflect a childlike sense of play, a dark fairytale influence – or to indicate the long passage of time. Crusty gates warp and distort, a braid tangles around an anchor, turkey tail mushrooms cluster on a child’s swimsuit.

Exhibiting these works together, born of individual narratives, creates interstices of relatedness – a widened psychic vista, a navigable field of universal associations, symbols, and language.

Becoming A Field asks, how do we embody landscapes? What shapes do our exiled energies take over time? What forgotten parts of ourselves are buried, wandering, or lost, and what relics remain to be excavated from our deeper wounds?

“The landscape in which identity is supposed to be grounded is not solid stuff; it's made out of memory and desire.” – Rebecca Solnit