Let Me Consider it From Here

Gritty faces look out from painted cages, surrounded by wax flowers, string, and various mutated forms. Photographs capture a studio wall marked by cryptic arrangements. A woman’s voice, floating in the space, relates her restless nighttime walks. Plush domestic rugs become the substrate for paintings of warped boots and menacing dogs.

Let me consider it from here presents four artists who operate in the liminal realms between the public and the intimate, the concrete and the fantastical. They frequently draw from their own histories, humors, and instincts as they grapple with or reimagine what’s happening in the world around them. Across a range of mediums, their works open up spaces that oscillate between strange and familiar, registering deeply personal experiences as well as more ambient cultural and political pressures.

How does an artist process the circumstances of their time in relation to their own milieu and psyche? The works in this exhibition are borne of different moments and places, whether 1970s Japan, in the case of Kudo; Europe around the early 2000s for Fletcher; and, for Hsu and DeJong, the present-day United States. Brought together here, in a period in which public life feels defined both by digital interconnection and vocal conflict on many fronts, their practices suggest other ways of meeting the world face to face: anchored in solitary places but stretching beyond, and drawing on a generative tension between inside and out.

In tandem with the gallery presentation, poets Geoffrey G. O’Brien, Simone White, and Lynn Xu have been invited to write new texts.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.