Meditations Curated by Susan Nathenson

Meditations features six artists working in painting and sculpture whose work resonates with the calming, healing, and repetitive mental and physical notions of meditating. Each one of these artists have the healing catharsis of an active art practice as a form of meditation. Large scale oil paintings, steel sculptures, and found object assemblage pieces come together to have quiet conversations showing the expanse of artistic practices with both abstraction and representational works.

The featured works of Melita Westerlund are in a constant state of change, perceivable only across long, quiet stretches of time. The artists’ steel sculptures undergo an aging process catalyzed by moisture in the atmosphere. Oxidation causes the surface to shrink inward while expanding outward, creating a unique texture-color phenomenon.

Howard Nathenson employs a variety of traditional media and disciplines of traditional and contemporary art. The artist is concerned with how natural forms transcend mere objects and become spiritually and psychologically relevant to both the viewer and myself. In the painting process, imagery becomes the artist’s world where objects such as trees, clouds, rocks, water and mountains take on a life of their own.

The work of Elaine Lorenz has always been connected to the earth and the natural beauty that has been given us. Much of her art practice revolves around referencing the natural world–various types of vegetation, rock formations or animals–in an abstract way.  The artist sees inspiration in everything from the grandeur of all-encompassing landscapes visited in her travels,  to the small green sprout appearing from the winter’s rest or a mushroom popping up through asphalt in her neighborhood. The uplifting forces, the perseverance and the endangerment of the natural world are all contemplated in the artist’s sculptures.

Sculptor Andras Böröcz finds that movement, whether actual or implied, reveals an inherent awkwardness, a humor that echoes human vulnerabilities. His works appear dreamlike in which fiction and reality meet, well-known tropes merge, meanings shift, past and present fuse. Time and memory always play a key role. Böröcz works with pencils as his signature material. He applies a poetic and often absurd, metaphorical language with references and ideas completely integrated into the process and composition of the work.

Anki King’s creative process is that of meditation. The artist will often cut a random piece of canvas, staple it to the wall and prepare it, then sit and wait until the idea for a painting reveals itself. In mindful quietness, she discovers imagery through colors and lines. Despite the physicality of her process using big brushes and large canvases, the imagery that appears are figures that have a stillness. They seem to be in a stasis where the world is moving past them, but they will be there, waiting for the world to slow down enough to meet them.

Elizabeth Goldman explores abstraction through a contemporary lens. In her hybrid works of drawing and painting, she confronts recollections of early childhood experiences during WWI–the horrors of aerial bombings in Scotland and her move to a dark and decimated post-war London. Working in material layers, she realizes these experiences through quasi-geometric forms and gestural manifestations of alienation and loss.

Opening Reception: Saturday, October 2, 2021 2:00-4:00pm. Free and open to the public.