"This Is My Nature"

February 1- May 4, 2008

Gabe Brown
Sandy Litchfield
Timothy McDowell
Jackie Tileston
Laura Sharp Wilson

Following their own path and intuition, these five contemporary artists explore and exploit the vast flexibility and freedom of the abstract painting and drawing genre.

By combining elements of terrestrial, animal, and/or botanical nature, fused with flat decorative patternings and colorful designs, this group of artists redefine the spatial and aesthetic boundaries of painterly abstraction. In some way, all five artists, within a contemporary mindset, deal visually with the natural environment fused with either the symbols of nature’s fecundity and our sometimes ambivalent malevolence towards it, or nature screened through a global consumer culture and utilized for quick, easy reference, sensual relief, or pretty decoration.

These are not traditional, perspective-oriented views of the world, but realms where layering, collage, graphic sensibilities, and depthless, flat orientations play an interactive and changeable dynamic role. In the paintings of these five artists, color can be both wildly graphic and intense as well as softly effusive and atmospheric. All elements, both painterly and natural are bursting, twisted, pressed, floating, and sealed within their hermetic atmospheres. This exhibition presents a particularly contemporary viewpoint as it pertains to abstraction through the layering, collaging, and juxtaposition of differing nature-oriented essentials through the scrim of paint. At the same time, it presents five unique points of view related to the filtering and fraught thoughts of nature and how it relates to current global cultures.