Rekindling Juvenescence
Rachel Stallings Thomander,
Message 5/ Mensaje 5
Crayon, 2023,
colored pencil, and acrylic on wood,
40" x 40"
Rekindling Juvenescence brings together four unique painters working collaboratively to discover a dialogue between the artists they are now and their childhood selves. Their desire is to unlock the unbridled creativity of youth while utilizing the skills and knowledge they have developed over decades. Their hope is to find a way to dissociate from years of academic analysis that often stifles creativity. These four artists form a small community of like-minded individuals who have attempted to rekindle their uninhibited creativity in their own work to varying degrees.
Working in an organic mode of experimentation, these artists endeavor to develop a purity of expression and form through play. Primitive, mythical, and folkloric elements will dominate the session as the artists experiment with new techniques using materials familiar to their younger selves. Readings from the Expressionist, Primitivist, Surrealist, Cubist, Modernist, and C.O.B.R.A. movements will spark conversations that push the artists to exercise their adolescent psyches.
Chris Lucius,
Don't forget how our lips have met, 2024,
Graphite and Carbon on paper,
40" x 42"
The Artists
Loren Erdrich is a Brooklyn-based artist who pursues the poetic link between the material and incorporeal. Using unconventional methods of applying pigment to her canvases, representational elements emerge over time. The materials have agency and yield compositions that disrupt the false binary of abstraction and representation.
Rachel Stallings Thomander is a Colombian American multidisciplinary artist. She lives and works in Santa Cruz, California with her husband and two children. Thomander's work activates an exchange between childhood and adulthood in objects that straddle decorative and utilitarian, opening the door to a fantastical realm of creative exploration.
Melissa Capasso is an upstate New York-based artist who works improvisationally with color, line, imagery, and pattern. Contradictory dualisms reflect in her process, tethering abstraction with representation, symmetry with reflection, and decay with life. Themes of protection, escape, and having a place of one's own run through her work.
Chris Lucius is a New York-based artist whose work focuses on the intersection between myth and memory and the interplay of contradicting methods or materials that brings to light that there is always something out of place. The work draws on dialogues with stylistic and thematic approaches derived from children's art, injecting the work with emotional and psychological intensity as well as an untethered sense of imagination.
