Material Moves

A statement from guest curator, David Linneweh

In a time when our lives are heavily inundated with media and connections that rarely pierce the surface, the artists in this exhibition create works that elicit a desire to stop, examine, and look beneath the surface. While abstraction is the primary visual language of the exhibition, each artist manipulates and transforms material in purposeful ways, creating moments of stillness and opportunities for deeper looking. A love and appreciation for formal qualities guide the work—not as distraction or decoration, but as a means of bringing elements together in ways that create wonder, interest, and a desire to examine how connections are formed.

While each artist manipulates materials to create abstract works, there are common threads beyond the strong formal elements of color, texture, and shape. Grid-like systems provide frameworks for exploring color and form in the works of April Behnke, while Gina Hunt’s woven paintings draw from the science of seeing. Structure emerges through the prismatic and layered topography present within Michael Wille’s paintings. There is also an interest in abstraction as it relates to the natural world, seen in the richly textured fields of color in Jason Rafferty’s work and the subtle yet sublime color fields within Neil Callander’s observations. Ellie Dale Anderson combines found and woven materials to create works concerned with renewal, while Bill Conger’s tondo paintings rest on the edge of resolution and collapse. Material is also reconfigured in the colorful shape-based works by Beth Humphrey and through Paul Loughney’s analog collages, which are created from repurposed commercial materials.

What is especially exciting about the artists in this exhibition is the way each draws from different sources of inspiration to create works that serve as gateways into other worlds of experience. Through their varied approaches to material, process, and abstraction, the works function as glimpses or fragments of another universe—portals into different realities and ways of seeing. They invite us to stop long enough to look inward, to reflect, and to consider the possibility of meaningful connection.