Messy Beck, Johanna St. Clair & Amber Jean Young: Heat Maps

Reception | September 1st, 2022 | 4-6 pm

Eleanor Harwood Gallery is delighted to announce this new group show with Messy Beck, Johanna St. Clair, and Amber Jean Young.

A heat map is a data visualization method used to depict varied or changing phenomena as color. This show explores womanhood, resilience, and nature through bold pigments and sharp contrasts. Heat Maps is about vibrancy, using bright hues and vivid patterns to chart passion.

Messy Beck brings us the exuberance and celebration of nakedness and sexuality, Johanna St. Claire the profusion and pleasure nature brings us, and Amber Jean Young digs from the memories in her life and lights up her paintings with references to her childhood, mother and father.

Together, the paintings bring us a vivid, warm and sensual take on our world. The paintings vary stylistically, with Beck’s work being illustrative and representational, nearly comic-book-like and playful. St. Claire's work is very close to abstraction with masterful oil-paint handling and sublime color juxtapositions reminiscent of Impressionism. Young’s hand feels contemporary and bold in keeping with currently well known still-life painters such as Anna Valdez and Hilary Pecis.

Together the works are adventurous and liberated, pointing us to what each artist finds compelling and fascinating in their own lives. Beck celebrates “the complex and dynamic nature of women." St. Clair revels in the busyness of lines presented by stalks, stems and blooms in a cacophonous natural world. Young’s work points to her upbringing. The patterns and textures in her work point to her mother’s love of textiles. The curtains and stages in her large painting Black Velvet Solo, refer to her father’s performances on stage that she attended as a child. Her father is Neil Young. We can imagine that music and theatricality played a huge part in her childhood. The patterns draped over the stage refer back to her mother. Black Velvet Solo is a family portrait of sorts, a heat map of memory.

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