Earth Phase
Jordan Ann Craig, Aleya Hoerlein, Elizabeth Hohimer, Boramie Sao, Matt Scobey, Taryn Slawson
February 3 - March 2, 2024
Earth Phase is a group exhibition including six artists living and working in Northern New Mexico and West Texas: Jordan Ann Craig, Aleya Hoerlein, Elizabeth Hohimer, Boramie Sao, Matt Scobey, & Taryn Slawson.
These artists work with the language of abstraction to explore form, color, light and movement through a range of materialities, often in relationship with notions of landscape.
Exhibition essay by Santa Fe, New Mexico based arts writer and poet
Caitlin Lorraine Johnson:
1.
Elizabeth Hohimer writes,
“my work is rooted in memory and emotion.”
Mistakenly I read,
“my work is rooted in memory and erosion.”
As if she had created, through these pieces, an uneasy resolution between the desire to remember and the desire to remain.
Elizabeth composed Pink and Blue Rainbows with agave fibers. Some lie stiffly, some bend or hang loose. The collaboration between artist and material reminds me of a poem by Carl Phillips—
Late in the Long Apprenticeship
At last, he’s asleep.
I can look at him the way I’m meant to.
His body moves like any ocean. The ocean moves like any field
back home: submission, submission’s shadow, wind, submission.
2.
When people ask Matt Scobey about art, he often pauses.
“Our culture is so used to immediate answers… Just having a sense of wonder in your own mind, that's the goal for me.”
To make the pieces in this show, Matt hammered copper to an impossible thinness and carefully attached it to rock.
The resulting work places manufactured and found beauty, skill and instinct, alongside each other.
“In some ways, when I make an artwork, it’s because I have a question about something and I want it presented in a space where other people can maybe help me process a feeling or emotion around that question.”
3.
In Aleya Hoerlein’s paintings, shapes enter or leave the frame, gradients dawn or dim. She creates liminal spaces. Thresholds.
This series was influenced by daily life during the pandemic—the long stretches of horizon outside her windows, the oil paintings slowly drying in her studio, and particularly the surreal experience of “being with” people while remaining six feet apart.
Feeling simultaneously near and far.
Here, white could be either presence or absence. Like suffused light moments after sunrise or before sunset.
Like anything in the process of becoming something else.
4.
Jordan Ann Craig is inspired by Cheyenne and Northern Cheyenne beadwork, how much or how little can establish a pattern.
Before Jordan settles on the final composition of a painting, she tries several variations with alternate patterns, colors, and sizes.
“The hardest part for me is designing. That’s the most time intensive part of creating the work.”
Not So Shy is smaller and simpler than many of Jordan’s other pieces. Rectangles and lines create boundaries and openings. Sometimes they seem to rotate or move forward and backward like a pulse.
She explains that, in some ways, this painting feels bolder than more elaborate paintings.
“I can't hide behind all the hours I’ve spent and compromises I've made. I have to let the painting be simple. That’s harder for me. I could sit and spend a hundred hours on something, but to just rely on the colors and shapes, to let it exist in its simplicity, that is for me more challenging.”
5.
Until this year, Boramie Sao rarely used black in her paintings. Then something shifted, made room.
Boramie says these shifts occur regularly. She has an intense period of creativity, followed by a lull, then another period of creativity. During the pause, impressions settle, evolve, create space for change.
A similar rhythm exists within the stillness of these pieces.
I think of how dancers move together across a stage, their bodies simultaneously attuned to each other and to the larger balance of shapes around them.
6.
We are surrounded by waves. Restless water. Currents of air or electricity.
Taryn Slawson is interested in the affect these waves have on our bodies and minds. How to make sense of them, find or create a place of refuge.
To make this weaving, Taryn connected one thread vertically and another horizontally countless times. Each stitch records its exact position within the space and duration of Solar Plasma.
I think of Jo Ann Beard’s essay The Fourth State of Matter (plasma is behind solid, liquid, and gas)—
“In a few hours the world will resume itself, but for now we’re in a pocket of silence. We’re in the plasmapause, a place of equilibrium, where the forces of the earth meet the forces of the sun. I imagine it as a place of stillness, where the particles of dust stop spinning and hang motionless in deep space.”
Jordan Ann Craig is a Northern Cheyenne artist living and working in Pojoaque Valley, New Mexico. She grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and received her B.A. from Dartmouth College. In 2017, Jordan was awarded the H. Allen Brooks Traveling Fellowship as well as the Eric and Barbara Dobkin Fellowship at the School for Advanced Research SAR). In 2019, Jordan was awarded artist residencies at the Institute for American Indian Arts (IAIA) and the Roswell Artist-in-Residence (RAiR) Program. She is represented by Hales Gallery, and her work is shown nationally and internationally.
Elizabeth Hohimer is an artist from Texas, based in Taos, New Mexico. She received her BFA in Textiles from the California College of the Arts. Her work is bound through an intersection of skilled tradition and a contemporary dialog between materials, memory and self. Hohimer represents harnessed feelings from immersing oneself in a color, place or emotion. The suspended passage of time that takes place where the horizon line is visible is seeped in Hohimer's work. Her woven paintings carry in them the lingering atmospheric notion of nostalgia for place due to the materials she chooses to employ. Her studio practice is build behind the inherent trust that materials embody emotion provided by sublime places. Process choices within production give time and space for the artist to re-harmonize dissonance, gaining potency. A sense of ethereal, allegorical, philosophical tendencies that are not grounded or interested in reality of the present float through her work. She is represented by Gerald Peters Gallery.
Aleya Hoerlein is a Taos, New Mexico based contemporary artist. She was raised in Fairfield, Iowa, by a creative family in a spiritual community that practiced transcendence. She went on to study art at The School of Visual Arts, in New York City, where she painted the figure and landscape but her attention was rapt by the shadows behind the figure or the sky beyond the landscape. She shifted her focus to abstract painting that is grounded by both reference to nature and transcendence. Hoerlein’s solo exhibition of abstract oil paintings, The Realm of Possibilities, was on view at the Encore Gallery at the Taos Center for the Arts October 13 through November 26, 2023. The exhibition included paintings from 2022 and 2023. The exhibition celebrated Northern New Mexico’s relationship with transcendental and abstract painting by showcasing Hoerlein’s contemporary, lucid rendering of the genres. Hoerlein’s paintings have appeared in publications such as Southwest Contemporary, New American Paintings, I Like Your Work, The Brooklyn Rail, and Hyperallergic, and have been on view in group shows at The Taos Center for the Arts’ Stables Gallery, G2 Gallery in Santa Fe, NM, Site:Brooklyn Gallery in Brooklyn, NY, The Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition, and The National Arts Club in New York, NY.
Boramie Sao is a self-taught Cambodian American Artist from Long Beach, California, currently residing in Taos, New Mexico. Sao reflects upon the challenging landscapes of the high desert where she lives, and ties a deep symbolism to any life that persists through the most tumultuous elements. She connects this symbolism to her heritage and ancestry, where the family stories passed down from her elders inspired the work she creates today. These intimate lessons she grew up with lie at the heart of her work, which would be left untold if not through oral or shared tradition. Sao’s acute observation of her environment and the meditative practice that has developed throughout the years of painting, gave her an understanding of balance and a profound appreciation for beauty within the natural world. The inherent stillness she strives to capture through her use of symbols, textures, colors and organic forms, are meant to tell these stories in a subtle, interpretive way. Sao’s titles work in a narrative form, gesturing a hint of her own experiences while leaving space for imagination. Her intuitive color palettes and unique use of shapes dwell in the depths of each piece, leaving the viewer to question whether it is meant to hide or reveal something beyond the surface.
Matt Scobey was born in Danville, Illinois and received a bachelor’s Degree in liberal arts from Colorado State University. After college he worked as astudio assistant for artist Ray King in Philadelphia before spending many years in Denver, Colorado working primarily in graphic design, illustration, and publishing . He participated in and contributed to all levels of the Denver art scene from DIY warehouse spaces, commercial galleries and working with the Denver Art Museum, Public Art Denver Arts and Venues, and Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. Since moving to Marfa, Texas he has worked as a guide and docent with Chinati and Judd Foundations and completed restoration work on Dan Flavin’s untitled (Marfa project) and Robert Irwin’s untitled (dawn to dusk) at Chinati Foundation.
Taryn Slawson is a self-taught weaver living and working in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her practice serves as a meditative exploration of what it is to be electrically sensitive in our modern world. Her woven patterns are an expression of her felt experience navigating life with an acute awareness of energies that often escape the notice of others. Taryn’s textiles encompass a body of work that includes fine art to functional objects and furniture. Taryn describes her experience of being electrically sensitive as an internally overwhelming and chaotic feeling, an energy that she attempts to transmute into a more grounded and coherent expression, via the loom. Living with this sensitivity has led Taryn to embrace a simpler way of living less dependent on the conveniences of mainstream technologies. Living her life somewhat out of context with the pulse of society, she is drawn to the deliberate and unhurried repetitions of working by hand. Taryn constructed her own loom unique to her weaving process, and prefers the slowness of her hands-on technique over other types of looms. The patterns that she weaves are bold and oscillate with an energy suggesting an endless vibrational field that extends beyond the confines of her woven canvases. She views her works not individually, but rather as a collection of interwoven frequencies; a non-verbal and continuous personal dialogue.
