Valerie Hird “Origination”
Nohra Haime Gallery
This event has ended.
In her new exhibition origination, Valerie Hird returns to the four elements of nature explored in her previous work, THE FIFTH DAY. While that phase was devoted to the generation of those elements, this group describes their interaction in a timeless cycle of creation.
Hird depicts each element as a strand, interlacing itself with others and ultimately forming the Elemental Knot. The body of work itself operates much like a strand within the larger series, proving indispensable to the resulting layers of complexity. Valerie Hird’s imagery is the product of numerous trips through the Middle East, Central Asia and Latin America. Merging her experiences with the symbols of various creation mythologies, she has spun a multi-dimensional cosmology of her own. This amalgam is a complex and personal interpretation of enduring motifs, from the intertwined loops of Solomon’s Knot to the Islamic interlace patterns to the plaits of the Celtic crosses - even traces of the Chinese Yin and Yang can be discerned.
The scale of the content remains nimbly ambiguous, perpetually oscillating between macro and microscopic. In Matrix, elemental interplay is a tangled knot, both viscera and vista, which opens the door to species generation. In Mountain Bones, nature’s structures are a kind of skeleton, rising to act as a receptacle for what might be vegetation, or veins.
Using a suggestive language of colors, patterns and other recollections from Hird’s wanderings, origination forges a contemporary understanding of ancient concepts about the history of our universe.
Media
Schedule
from October 22, 2014 to November 15, 2014
Opening Reception on 2014-10-21 from 18:00 to 20:00