event description
“Many artists are drawn to middle spaces, collective in-betweens to gather. Thicket here is a middle space, not a clearing or a dense cover. This group of artists reflects an impulse toward greenery and lushness tempered by scale. Many works show a density but with a welcome uncertainty.
There is a sense that the thicket is both compellingly lush and dangerous and also small and weedy. Some works showcase the threatening precariousness of edge spaces, others detail the invasive species that constitute a great many thicket-spaces.
Each artist chosen for this investigation reveals a corner of the brush, from bright greenery to scrubby brown and orange dead leaves below. There is a clean well-lit space rendered in textile and a squishy lush dark space in oil. Some works present abstractions of the idea of thicket, from the energy of the twittering birds to the strangeness of the combination of life growing at the edges of farmland and human civilization. I invite you into each artist's world, many of them jewel box depictions of space outdoors. Most importantly, this is a gathering space.” –Kirstin Lamb, curator