NYAB Event - "Awakening" Exhibition

"Awakening" Exhibition

Tria Gallery

This event has ended.

Awakening celebrates the beginning of spring, when the earth and its inhabitants come alive with lush greenery, blue skies, chirping birds, and a sense of optimism for the future.

Though both Nelson and Park re-create the natural beauty they see around them, their visions take very different paths. Nelson's oils suggest abstract landscapes, painted in earthy pastel tones - greens, blues, teals and browns, with occasional accents of orange which might suggest a wildflower. A bold grey stroke leaves the viewer with a sense of rocks, or permanence. And her use of blue reflects her affinity for water. Nelson is also influenced by spaces where she creates her work, such as studios in barns, sheds and en pleine air in the countryside.

Nelson applies layer upon layer of paint and scrapes the canvas with her favored device - a small and narrow triangular palate knife - to get a sense of depth and subtle color bleeding that gives the sensation of movement, as in a stream or cloud-filled sky. Creating both large and small works, Ms. Nelson lets the viewer interpret the exact place or moment, and know that they are witnessing the earth at its finest.

Park has created mixed media collages made of photographs cut into thousands of tiny pieces which she then re-assembles onto paper where they are then mounted and framed under glass. Her recent works of micro-collage and paper mosaic capture the tremor of unstable presence. Park takes pictures of parts of the body or face, changes the color and saturation of those images by photoshopping, prints them out on paper, then tears the pictures and pastes them back together piece-by-piece.

Painstakingly, she creates images of people morphing gradually into trees and flora, their bodies magically transformed into composites of the human and of natural elements. However improbable this might seem, the marriage of the androgynous form and nature here seems normal and somehow even expected because of the graceful depictions and the extremely detailed work. Using beautiful colors and creating depth and shadows with the collage, her work seems to burst with energy and exuberance.

Both Nelson's and Park's works, inspired by nature, are graceful and elegant, and create for the viewer an anticipation for and a visual celebration of spring.