“Isthmus” at Nearby Gallery

Isthmus

Opening reception Dec. 11th, 6-9pm

Nearby Gallery - Newton, MA

Nearby Gallery Presents the art of Cicely Carew and Michael MacMahon. This exhibition explores how we navigate the worlds we inherit and how we build on the cultural overlay of human presence.

The work of Cicely Carew bridges a myriad of experiences as worlds emerge from a deep engagement with what surrounds us. The expanded consciousness of Carew’s work layers process, time, radical joy and liberation. Stories contain emergent themes of our human experience on a micro and macro level engaged with the language of abstraction. Materiality and experimentation emphasize the parallels of rigorous play and invention. A victorious color field suffused with linguistic mark-making, biomorphic shapes, torn edges, sinuous gestures, and embellishments celebrates the energy of risk-taking. Layers of paint and other materials consider the tensions of space, perception, and belonging. Her practice asks for a willingness to reconsider our relationship to the unknown and locate ourselves in the constellation of infinite possibilities.

The work of Michael MacMahon builds layers of polychromatic grids that displace direct engagement with the landscape. The contemporary landscape reflects a living synthesis of people, place, economic need, curiosity, seen and unseen forces that have brought peoples from different cultures and communities into contact across great distances. Whether through clashes or cooperative endeavors, these convergences have brought about the adaptation of living within a contemporary culture that is an ever evolving aggregate state.

This exhibition navigates personal trajectories and visionary languages offering up visual triangulations and a precarious balance of perception and proximity where excavations, meditations and boundaries explore our proximity to the present, past and future. Detached from any single point of orientation, this exhibition emerges as a study of the body as an entity from which the world emerges and the body in proximity to its experience.