Wild Gods

Wild Gods

Opening Reception

November 17, 2022
4:00 to 7:00 pm
Located in the CRC Art Gallery

Exhibit Dates

November 17, 2022 to January 13, 2023
Monday to Thursday
12:00 to 4:00 pm

Appointments available December 12, 2022 to January 12, 2023, Monday to Thursday only. 

About the Exhibition

Featuring artwork by Anne Gregory, Richard Herrera, Debra van Hulsteyn, Kim Scott, Mel Smothers, Peter Spencer, Stephanie Taylor, Burnell Vassar, and Shelley Zenter.

Curator: Geri Donovan

Fire is an element which has enabled human survival and civilization. It also brings catastrophic and immediate change. The California wildfires have been devastating, for life and for land. Lives, homes, and our sense of place are irretrievably lost, only existing as a memory. Given the profound effects of both the events and their aftermath, the fire becomes part of us, has become inextricably woven into our story.  It is the task of the artist to process human experience, craft and recraft our stories, and ultimately to find meaning.

It has been a challenge to integrate the works these artists contained within the exhibit are vastly different ways of working, senses of vision and choice of media. Each artist is a sage in their own right, each a master of the story. They come together to craft a new narrative.

Birds, dead and dying, thick smoky air, ruined trees and structures like smoldering monuments to an angry god. Image after image, portrays the silence that falls after cataclysm. They serve as a sonorous elegy to what was. Works of abstract figuration crafted from charred wood, become corpses, become tombstones, become metaphor for an order that once existed and will never again be again, become the new normal.

It is inevitable to see death in our environmental devastation. The works reflect the austere beauty and finality of such destruction. Yet one can also see the beginnings of a resurrection. The color, the movement, the dance of the strokes across the paper, the imagery, says something. These artists place us squarely in the cycle of death and rebirth. Without exception they allude to that never-ending circle. I hear them whisper. New shoots push through the ash and bone. Leaves unfurl. The sounds of rustling barely audible in the underbrush come into our awareness. The song of birds rises. This is not an ending. This is not a beginning. This just is.