On view March 5, 2016 – April 7 2016
Pearce’s twenty feet high “Clouty Tree” structures, made of sticks and ragged cloth, hold three paintings up high, making them into offerings in the sky. Clouty trees can be found all over Europe and America, where the ancient traditions of the West are still alive, barely concealed by the modern world. Art brings old ways into the present, refreshing them and making them relevant to our technological world – reminding us of the perennial truths of our relationship to the natural world, stirring the memory of our ancestors’ experiences of a more elemental, more immediate environment than ours. Just as we explored folk traditions in the creation of modernism, now we explore it in search of the emergent age.
Visitors to the gallery are invited to tie their own rags to the trees, leaving their cares and prayers behind them.
The large paintings in the show are based on medieval images, originally used for moral instruction in an illiterate age. “There is no Dark Side of the Moon”, “The Carmine Devil”, “What in the World?” and the impressively named, “Self Portrait as an Imaginary Character in a Made-up Harry Potter Movie with a Soundtrack by Nick Cave” are Pearce’s latest additions to a large collection of twenty-two interpretations of these images called “The Secret Paintings”, which has produced during the last six years. He anticipates completing the collection late in 2016.
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 5, 2016 at 7:00 PM (RSVP on Facebook)
