The Moon and Serpent at Orgy Park

The Moon and Serpent
Opening March 18, 2016 6-9pm
Ashley Garrett | Emily Davidson | Mike Olin

It’s funny where the mind can take you, into an imagined labyrinth or half-remembered places that open up inside your head. The mind can drift from one thing to the next – presenting a composite of sensory experiences which flash by – unrelated feelings or others with a sureness of place may suddenly emerge. Paintings can explore this state; a mysterious and rhythmic inner experience akin to water in the body being pulled by the moon. The artists in “The Moon and Serpent”, present their paintings, as a seance to the moments where they explore this magic. They stave off confusion and doubt to find focus, they develop new visual languages to compose with conviction images and spaces. Sometimes working hard into the night with brushes and at other times, simply journeying upstairs, fiddling, to find the light bulbs that turn on. Emily Davidson uses motifs of text that follow image and at times images that follow other images in hard to-describe, landscape-type spaces, sections next to other sections that come out of time. She uses the mind as a weather vane to turn it this way and that as you get into her paintings. Ashley Garrett conjures precious moments of victory; winning ribbons in horse competitions or cherished christmas tree ornaments. She paints with flashes of memory and invention, and her modes of figuration feel as though they break up space in near or far landscapes; they haunt and wind with distance. Mike Olin, with a romantic action, adheres little bits of assemblage, matchsticks, trading cards, shiny foil, string, packets of soy sauce and other little gestures of common clipping to his surfaces. His dance shows active fluid paint smearing and dripping in fans of sfumato or bursts of quick motions, with pinball flippers and stars in the sky, spaces reserved as painting spaces slithering through with finesse.

237 Jefferson Street 1b Brooklyn, NY 11237 orgypark.com

Image credit: Ashley Garrett “Safe Keeping”