Join local artist Anna Bayles Arthur for a reception of her exhibit, “Selected paintings,” on display at The LAVA Center in September and October.
In this new body of work, Anna Bayles Arthur continues to employ a playful, intuitive process to develop her unique vocabulary of forms. Careful layers of transparent pigments provide a ground from which these forms seem to emerge and disintegrate. And it is through this spacial ambiguity that she hints at a fluidity of another kind of boundary, that which exists between dream and reality, conscious and subconscious. The explicit organicism within these compositions draws the viewer into a world that is both familiar and unfamiliar: biology, landscape, things mechanical, parts of composite bodies. Relationships unfold within the confines of the rectangle, constructed narratives that echo the drama of the natural world. It is just beneath the surface of these narratives that the viewer might find that familiar tug, an intimation of some ancient memory that moves within us: primordial water worlds, the emergence of basic life forms, surfaces of stone and mineral, dark voids. And perhaps by tapping some of these latent memories, one might touch upon a more collective human experience, a glimpse into our fleeting and mysterious part in this vast ecosystem.
