DAVID T. ALEXANDER
Inscapes and the Persistence of Nature
Opening reception 5pm - 7pm Friday, October 25th - December 21st
How do you distill the energy of endless seas and skies, monumental mountains and cliffs, and vast prairies and deserts into something more tangible? It’s something that painter David T. Alexander has endeavored to do with his work for most of his career. Whether on imposing canvases that span several feet or pieces that can be held with two hands, the exuberant, layered brushstrokes packed with color are part of a constant dialogue taking place between Alexander and the natural world.
Much of his latest work is inspired by recent explorations in New Mexico, a state he first visited in 1996 and felt immediately drawn to. “I instantly fell in love with the desert,” he recalls. “I don’t know why, but I feel extremely comfortable there – well, not comfortable because it’s not a comfortable place in the desert physically – but visually I find it astounding.”
Alexander says the work is “an amalgamation of where I’ve hiked, driven through, walked over, looked at, thought about, that is so different than where I live.” Some of the pieces show dramatic shifts between mesas and buttes, rock and sky, while others show a land patterned with sage and juniper. Many reference areas that left him quietly awestruck. “At one point I couldn’t even talk about the landscape I was looking at because it was so different than what I’ve experienced there many times. But I’m always looking for that experience – it’s got to be there for me.”
Each time Alexander puts brush to canvas or pen or pencil to paper, the end result contains a degree of that type of experience. It’s become an almost daily ceremony of endless reexamination and contemplation, of “being in a place over and over and over, until I don’t need to look anymore” Alexander states. “I can honestly say I go to bed, I dream about making art, I wake up and I make more art. I can’t stop. The inquiry is never ending.”
View work by David T. Alexander ►
NICHOLAS HERRERA | Pasión
On display through December 21st
A trail of pickup trucks piled high with timber winds down a mountain road—firewood for heating residents’ homes come winter. A farmer slops new mud on his old horno oven, as his ancestors have done for centuries. A rusted metal heart containing horseshoes, gears, and nuts and bolts of all sizes, all welded together to represent that organ’s hidden inner workings. A line of penitentes (penitents) make their way to church to be blessed.
Such are the images Nicholas Herrera creates in his self-taught, almost primitive style in his studio on ancestral land in El Rito, about an hour north of Santa Fe. Life in these remote northern New Mexico villages, their yearly secular and religious rituals, and the often-harsh realities of life generally—all are woven into his works.
Herrera’s Pasión explores the finality of death and the brutality and heartbreak of war and oppression, with a good dose of current politics. That’s what’s on his mind right now.
View work by Nicholas Herrera ►
EVOKATION | art + culture + inspiration | July 2024 issue
Be aware in the present. Notice the magic and beauty of the moment. These are Jeremy Miranda’s painting mantras. Miranda finds in daily life unlimited inspiration for his paintings. The works he exhibits in Evoke’s Summer Salon are interior environments and exterior scenes close to home.
“I’m finding beauty in everything,” says Miranda, whose latest pieces include images of a pot of boiling water and a simple wooden table with two chairs. Miranda never travels far from home to find his subjects. Instead, he portrays interior and exterior scenes within a five-mile radius of his studio. “I couldn’t paint a place I visit,” he says. “I need to feel a connection to a place. When I do, I start to see the whole universe there. Then I can drift into a kind of cosmic existence when I paint.”
Other artists in the Summer Salon Part lI exhibit include David T. Alexander, Christopher Benson, Lynn Boggess, Esha Chiocchio, Jeremy Mann, Javier Marín, Louisa McElwain, Soey Milk, Kristine Poole, Lee Price, Michael Scott, Andrew Shears, Thomas Vigil, and Aron Wiesenfeld.
read past issues ►
Gallery Info
Gallery hours are: Monday through Saturday, 10 - 5.
* Gallery closed Labor Day, Monday September 2nd
You may reach us via Email and 505.995.9902 telephone messaging daily 10 - 5.
Thank you for your continued support.
LOOKING & SEEING
one long look at one work of art
featuring Coming of Age by Otto Rigan
John O'Hern is an arts writer, curator and retired museum director who is providing a weekly contemplation of a single work of art from our gallery. In our fast-paced lives overflowing with information, we find it necessary and satisfying to slow down and take time to look. We hope you enjoy this perspective from John.
Standing outside Evoke is a 75-inch tall sculpture of limestone and gold leaf. Limestone is a solid rock formed over millions of years when calcium-rich minerals precipitate out of water, or when shells of marine animals settle and become compressed, sometimes maintaining their forms as fossils. Gold is a soft, malleable element, so much so that it can be hammered paper thin and applied to icons, picture frames….and carved limestone.
Otto Rigan’s Coming of Age is a result of his life-long exploration of light. The carved, pyramidal forms in the limestone are gilded and are juxtaposed with the natural stone. The gold mineral reflects and becomes light, appearing different in bright sun or cloudy skies. James Turrell, whose sculptures of light, color and space have earned him the title of “master of light”, says “Light is not so much something that reveals, as it is itself the revelation.” Just as the gold in Otto’s sculpture becomes light, immaterial light becomes substance.
The gold pyramids also reflect colors around them—the trees or the color of your coat as well as the reflection of it on an adjoining pyramid. Otto notes that the color intensifies where the bases of the pyramids join and lightens toward their outer points. “Looking and Seeing” require a bit of fine tuning to appreciate the subtleties of the sculpture.
The fine tuning of the viewer’s perception is referred to by Arvo Pärt, the great Estonian composer, who wrote about light: “I could compare my music to white light which contains all colours. Only a prism can divide the colours and make them appear; this prism could be the spirit of the listener.”
Otto recalls sitting in a Lutheran church as a boy, terrified by the sermons, but enraptured by the sunlight coming through amber glass windows as the transmitted light animated the pulpit and the other objects in the church.
“I was fascinated by light going through the lens of glass,” he explains. “When I got into college, I was studying to be a painter, but I always had an interest in glass. My only real knowledge of glass had been working with stained glass. I did an apprenticeship in my early 20s, learning about architectural glass and I became familiarized with the medium. I learned to handle it and I learned to understand it. And I learned to understand what light does. In other words, it's not just about making a window, it's about how it affects the environment.”
Later, working in Santa Fe, he learned that glass also has a compressive capacity roughly equal to that of granite. He began stacking discarded fire bricks from old kilns with sheets of picture glass he got from a local frame shop. “And sure enough,” he says, “it kind of worked. When you consider stone to be impenetrable and you insert a light seam of glass and it still carries the load, it works. So that’s how I ended up getting pretty serious about using it as a medium.”
An early sculpture is X#1 (Fred), 1988. Otto roams the stone yard of a quarry searching for pieces to work with—often looking for something to fit an idea but just as often getting an idea after finding a stone. The owner of the quarry once asked, “Otto, why do you always choose the ugliest rocks we have?” To which he replied, “Because there's room for a relationship. If it's an incredibly beautiful stone by its own self, I don't want to cut it. I don't want to do anything to it. I want to find one that enables me to do something with it. So as soon as I cut a straight line through you suddenly see an edge. As soon as you embed glass in it, suddenly you're seeing inside that stone. You take something ugly and make something that you almost want to embrace and that, to me, that's success.”
In 2015 he unveiled Genesis, a 24 by 40-foot steel and cast glass sculpture at Spaceport America in Truth or Consequences, NM, part of a commission he won from over 200 entries. It is an arc of COR-TEN steel that will continue to develop its patina of rust as its mirrored cast glass “stars” will mirror the stars above it as they appear at the summer solstice.
Otto’s weighty, substantial standing sculptures, his wall sculptures and his architectural installations have an unexpected lightness of being, life in the inanimate. As light animates Coming of Age and it reflects its environment, we’re given the opportunity to contemplate the complementary relationship of opposites.
