02/05/2025
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COSMOLOGIES
• Opening to the public, January 27th.
• Opening Artist’s reception Feb 22nd / To coincide with Family Weekend/ 2-4 pm
• Closing Exhibition April 18th
This exhibition explores practices and methodologies emerging from a commitment to a deep exploration of subjectivity.
Where the contemporary art world is committed to investing in forms of exteriority and their relationship to language operations, 'Cosmologies' looks in a different direction, orienting us towards forms of knowledge that arise from deeply subjective origins.
Freud’s emphasis on exteriority and Lacan’s brilliant leap into semiotics have been invaluable for feminist theory and cultural theory in general, but at times this has come at the cost of undervaluing those aspects of subjectivity that resist the paradigm. In contrast, Carl Jung encourages embracing the idea of a cosmological mind, magical thinking and mythology as deep reservoirs of the human unconscious. The five artists shown here, in one way or the other, represent this desire to speak from this authentic, individual, poetic and mysterious place.
Mimi Allin’s video/performances emerge from a commitment to art as movement. Her videos are intensely physical and reject quick interpretation. They are extracted from 5 years of durational performances made across the USA, France, Estonia, Mongolia and Korea. Mimi is currently walking in a path that spells the word l-o-v-e in cursive letters across the USA. This 17,000-mile, 3-year walk, seeks to raise awareness of present geopolitical conditions affecting our perception of one another and to counter the ethnocentric and ethnophobic forces fueling the war machine.
Michael Abrams’ diffuse landscape paintings are less about landscape than about the evocation of landscape in relationship to memory. The surfaces are impeccable and reflective, resisting the viewer’s desire to locate the work within expressionist conventions. The paintings’ cool, always blue color schemes, speak to a deep sense of melancholy, longing and desire. It is in this liminal space these paintings do their work, invoking an archetypical embrace of imagination.
c marquez’s delicate and evocative wall installations use natural elements configured into evanescent patterns in an ‘all-over’ strategy. These humble materials coupled with an exquisite sense of composition are disarmingly beautiful; where beauty and abstraction conjure up so much more than these terms would normally signify. In a very clear way these works seek to q***r the conception of art, from its historical, patriarchal desire for the monumental and bombastic to the subtle, delicate, complex and evocative subjective.
Rick Harlow’s paintings represent a quiet belief in the power of images to transform and heal. Rick’s immaculate and painstakingly ‘hard-won’ surfaces feel like no human hand has intervened in their making. Their deep and resonant voices portray an artist at the top of his game, looking at the past while propelling into the future. Rick’s work acknowledges the historical and rich tradition of Color Field Painting, so well represented by artists working in Southern Vermont during the 1970’s.
Keri Straka’ mixed media pieces conjure up the visceral and the corporeal. These complex artworks defy quick interpretation, instead they provoke tactile and somatic experiences, through an original combination of ceramics and fabric components. These sculptures are clearly in conversation with George Bataille and his poetic and transgressive ‘Visions of Excess.’
Humberto Ramirez
Curator
Fine Arts Gallery - Landmark College - Putney, VT
2025
Video: Michael Abrams
