Anglim/Trimble is pleased to present In a grove, a gathering of artists utilizing abstraction to create rapturous states of vision marked by the qualities of the sensorial and perceptual. Curated by Dean Smith, the exhibition includes work by Thomas Akawie, Brad Brown, Mason Dowling, Donald Feasél, Renée Gertler, Robin McDonnell, and Nancy White.

Inspired by the titular poem of San Francisco visionary poet Philip Lamantia, In a grove expresses the elusive and terrifyingly ecstatic nature of our attempt to decipher the language of the godhead — whose unknowable aspects lie beyond actions or emanations.

The symbolism of a sacred grove is not that of a woodland specifically, rather a sacred grove represents a clearing, a framing device as it were, a site allowing access to the spiritual world obtained in a natural, albeit mediated, setting. Sacred groves across various culture past and present are found environments that create links between the realm of the gods and the profane world of humans. A grove alternatingly invokes both the image of a virginal enclosed sylvan space and that of nascent architecture—a realm delineated as separate and different from the landscape of ordinary life. In the Middle Ages, the architecture of Gothic cathedrals, whose soaring columns and elaborately vaulted ceilings echoed such natural woodland clearances, provide the clearest example in architecture of a translation of the natural into the ideational, i.e., an abstracted, idealized zone. The sacred grove is, therefore, a threshold space, a portal to a domain of the transformative.

The artists’ works in the exhibition address the exploration of spaces that create a demarcation between the body and the outside/other, between the self and non-self, or something greater than the self, and sites that vacillate between the agrestic and the architectonic.

Thomas Akawie’s airbrushed paintings manifest unfolding, mystifying forms that are granted the gravity of their own cosmos. Nancy White’s acrylic on linen paintings of subtly nuanced and interlocking colored shapes establish hushed, evocative spaces of contemplation and mystery. Brad Brown’s paintings of perplexing organic figures set within frameworks create mise en scènes of supple disquietude.

Donald Feasél’s acrylic stain paintings conjure cataclysmic expressions of the sublime that alternate between bodily interiors and galactic forces. Robin McDonnell’s sculptures and paintings give dynamic structure to the vaporous and ephemeral qualities of light, creating gateways to extra-dimensional spaces.

Simultaneously expansive and claustrophobic, and redolent with visceral qualities, Mason Dowling’s acrylic paintings of preternatural landscapes vacillate between the totemic and pastoral. Renée Gertler’s arcane, enigmatic sculptures fuse the mineral and the somatic into occult structures that gather energy around themselves, forming an ethereal vastness in contrast to their diminutive scale.

The artists of In a grove ask us to consider wonderment and enigma as strategies for exploring what it means to reach outside the self and its environment into something far greater. They too ask what the possibilities of deciphering the talk of the gods may ultimately reveal.

Anglim/Trimble