𝖂𝖎𝖓𝖙𝖊𝖗𝖎𝖓𝖌
Aron John Dubois, Patricia Fernández, Sophy Hollington, Benjamin Styer, &
A History of Frogs

November 19, 2022 – January 14, 2023

Wintering celebrates the period after the harvest, the coming of autumn and winter, featuring works by Aron John Dubois, Patricia Fernández, Sophy Hollington, Benjamin Styer, and A History of Frogs. Taking inspiration from medieval manuscripts and devotional tools, the works in this exhibition encourage us to tune into the shifts in our work and lives that come with the changing of seasons, and to welcome the oncoming colder, leaner, and quieter months. 

Contemplating the ways in which we are connected with our environment through our work, especially in rural areas, artists in this exhibition were prompted to reflect on the medieval convention of the Labours of the Months. Beginning around the thirteenth century, wealthy patrons would commission artists to produce illuminated calendars within books of hours, breviaries, and other manuscripts intended for prayer. These illuminated calendars frequently took the form of Labours of the Months, which featured illustrations of agricultural and domestic tasks performed during distinct times of the year by the peasants who worked on the patrons’ land and in their home. Astrological symbols, crops and animals, feasts and festivals, and other items of religious significance would feature in these illustrations, grounding the owner of these devotional texts in the belief that all things proceeded from God’s order and according to his will. These lavish illustrations have preserved a portrait of medieval life, and the ways in which labor, celebrations, and times of rest were organized by the changing of the seasons. They also preserve a record of the connection between the working class and their environment, depicting a life that was intimately tied to the seeds planted, crops grown, and animals tended.

In Wintering, several artists reflect on the cyclical nature of time, their works echoing the shape of the wheel, the clock, the astrological chart. Patricia Fernández’s Guide is one such work, a central circular form emblazoned with painted versions of her signature x-shaped carvings and planetary transits on a cochineal-dyed canvas. Fernández’s work is always an exploration of our relationship to cycles: of time, of the body, and of history. Her labor-intensive practices of hand-carving, collecting and dyeing with cochineal, painting and writing, all stem from a desire to re-perform the past to better understand the present. 

Similarly, Sophy Hollington’s hand carved lino-cut prints confront the past by revisiting arcane and esoteric topics such as meteoric folklore, alchemical symbolism, tarot and cartomancy- bringing them into our time in a way that they become vibrant and tangible to the modern seeker. Her work Gnomic Seal bears the slogan: “Earth shall breed. Sun wears a hood. Frost shall freeze. Fire eat wood.” An elemental sigil for the winter season which Sophy has partially culled from The Exeter Book, the largest and oldest known manuscript of English Literature. The gnomic verses contained in The Exeter Book express meaningful sayings, often in rhyming verse to aid the memory. Her words whirl around the circular shape of the seal, reminding us that we are tethered to the cyclical nature of the seasons, brought close to the flame as the cold and dark conquer. 

Benjamin Styer’s paintings also reference historic esoterica, hauntological illuminations, and gothic remembrances. Isle of B and Sleepwalking Stickerbook draw from medieval miniatures and manuscript marginalia, as if torn from a page of The Limbourg Brothers’ Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry. With a colorful and psychedelic quality recalling the medieval revivalism of the 1970s; Styer’s works lean into the fantastical, reminding us that wintering can also mean taking time to rest, play, and dream. 

Aron John Dubois debuts paintings on canvas for the first time in this exhibition, a development on his explorations of compositions resembling uncanny fusions of symbols or subjects akin to riddles or puzzles. The largest of his paintings, The Shadow’s Trundle, depicts the crone figure bracing against the winter wind, overlaid by a spiral form, the wheel of the season turning. The figure is flanked by a series of icons- a pear and a pomegranate, a bountiful harvest and a memento mori, a playful mask to indicate All Hallow’s Eve, and a fire to light the way. Tracing the disappearance and re-emergence of nature through the fall and winter seasons, Dubois explores the deep connection between the human psyche and the landscape we inhabit.

The only sculptural work in the exhibition, A History of Frogs’ Wintering Bell is a domestically-scaled functional work intended to be rung by visitors to the exhibition, its sound calling humans and animals inside from the winter weather. The couple and artist duo behind A History of Frogs, Chase Biado and Antonia Pinter, live and work in Los Angeles, but Antonia grew up on a small farm in Washington. This work was made to speak to her nostalgia for the changing seasons, and bridges a worldbuilding logic of design and functionality with an elven-folk aesthetic unique to their collaboration. Welcoming us in from the cold, the Wintering Bell is the centerpiece of the exhibition it is named for, holding the touch of all those who enter The Valley to celebrate the season. ·❆·