Ashley Garrett Silver Goblin

Ashley Garrett Silver Goblin

Zach Seeger EYE

Zach Seeger EYE

WHORL

“Imagination outstrips all the world’s magicians: it not only places the real before our eyes…but also, with a power more potent than that of magic, it draws that which does not exist out of the state of potentiality, gives it a semblance of reality, and makes us see, feel and hear these new creations."

                                                                                                             -Johann Jakob Bodmer

For our opening exhibit of 2017 SRO GALLERY is pleased to present Whorl, a two person exhibition featuring the works of Ashley Garrett and Zach Seeger.

In Whorl Ashley Garrett and Zach Seeger reveal separately their dual external and internal worlds that can only materialize through a trust that painting and sculpture will protect their vulnerable side through this reciprocated effort.

In her “ribbon” paintings Garrett finds form in the highlights emanating from the axis of a ribbon that holds the meaning in its prize.  The painting however, moves the viewer through a landscape evoking, in some turns, a darker scent, one that brings us around the prize and into a pungent burrow.  In other ribbon paintings she accesses invented flowers.  The decorative qualities of the arising forms become more like gems and precious stones in some.  They soar in an invented air of biological architecture.  Like helixes in the landscape one wonders where they exist.

In her landscapes there is evident misremembering. The key to achieving the prize lies in feeling safe, trusting that faint sensation of landscape surrounding the helix is uninhabited.  Although we can never quite grasp it, the duality will protect our vulnerable side in its seclusion, privacy and estrangement.

Zach Seeger’s paintings of eyes continue our wonder with hording; clashing color schemes and shards of empty interior light emanating from within and outside it’s vacant eye, the canvas becomes a kind of eyelid itself, blinking back at you.

You can enter through the pupil, as it is a portal through the looking glass, or into the non-conformist foxhole.  Then again, it could be our reflection we are seeing.  Either way, we feel that there is something forgettable about us and we don’t have the scent to look back.

Snake, one of Seeger’s sculptures, presents another coiled image for consideration within our narrative.  The weightiness of its material, pigmented carved timber, rears up in a partially coiled defensive posture. Sword, also of timber, has only the humorous likeness of a sword, its meaning held in allegory, with trepidation or folly.

Both artists are painting a fantasy.  Their metaphors of ribbons and eyes echo the symbolist era and register their experience.  Each looks outside to look in, inside to look out, at times strikingly confrontational and humorous.