Catharine Clark Gallery announces Night House, an exhibition of new drawings by Josephine Taylor, on view September 30 – December 23, 2023, in the South Gallery. At once both intimate and immersive, Taylor’s compositions invite us into the extraordinary lifeworld of a family and its environment: the quiet meals, the sleepless nights, the moments of rest in between wake and dream. It is also a body of work about color: the dusky grey blue of night and the shifts in light and dark that shape and inform our emotional responses and moods.
Taylor writes: “Night House is made up of portraits of the people and things in my home at night. More than that, it is a selfportrait of a feeling and a state of being. It explores how I see things in the most private moments of my family’s domestic life, under the cover of darkness. I see color differently throughout the night: sometimes, the world around me appears covered in a thin, steel-gray veil; and at other times, it feels suffused in an inky flood of indigo.”
She continues: “The works in this show explore how persistent melancholy morphs not just what we see, but also how we see. Bleary eyed and exhausted at night, I often sit and stare at whatever is in front of me: a family member sleeping, a vase of flowers, a doorway lit from behind. Nighttime brings an altered state: things bleed together, light plays with dark, and static objects become luminous and activated. The environment feels total in the way that a singular, complex organism might. Night breathes; it pulses and glows.”
“After many months of observation, I realized that night often shrouds space with a luminous blue cast. After experimenting with synthetic blue pigments and paints, I felt an increased dissatisfaction with how blue as color was represented. I shifted course, abandoned my synthetic inks, and reached for one of the most ancient sources of blue—the indigo plant. Through a labor and time intensive process, I used dry and liquid indigo to render these images, either rubbing the indigo directly onto unprimed canvases or spraying it directly onto the surface. I never apply a paintbrush or drawing instrument to the canvas; in this way, I am trying to create an image with color in its truest form. I want the medium and the process to echo the emotional content of the work. In the dry indigo works, I want to evoke the physical demands of rubbing, and the idea of creating a mark or stain as opposed to lifting it away; with the liquid indigo works, I want to draw attention to the permanence of natural dyes, the unforgiving nature of it, and the unharnessed bleeding liquidity of it.”
“Ultimately,” Taylor remarks, “I hope that the viewer walks away wondering about melancholy, family, and night; and in that space, I hope the viewer recognizes the great potential for heightened beauty in those moments when we are pushed to the limits of our emotions.”
In conjunction with Taylor’s exhibition, the gallery presents An art school that is riddled with doubt by Jon Rubin, on view September 30 – November 4, 2023. Installed in EXiT and the Vestibule, Rubin’s work critically and humorously invites us to consider how we imagine creatively sustainable lives. As part of Rubin’s presentation, the gallery exhibits his banner installation Photograph Yourself Naked at Your Parents’ House (2018), originally presented at the San Francisco Art Institute. In Rubin’s installation, myths, legends, lies, and misremembered stories of past student art works are presented as both cautionary tales to be never repeated and possible instructions to future students.
