WINTER GROUP SHOW
Through January 25, 2025
The Winter Group Show at Evoke Contemporary is a an exhibition offering a diverse and compelling selection of contemporary art. With its blend of landscape painting and figurative sculpture, it provides a rich, multi-layered experience. The contrast between the natural world, depicted through the landscapes, and the emotional depth explored through the human form in the sculptures creates a dynamic dialogue between the works.
The tactile quality of the pieces, especially with the varied materials, adds a physical dimension to the experience, making it more immersive. This captivating show runs through January 25, 2025 in Santa Fe’s Railyard Arts District.
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.
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Gallery Info
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LOOKING & SEEING
one long look at one work of art
featuring First Tracks II by Esha Chiocchio
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.
Esha Chiocchio says, “I think of soil as a very precious thing and am interested in soil and land restoration, healing the damage people have done on this planet.”
Her photographs document the traditional annual remudding of the Great Mosque of Djenné, Mali, West Africa, for “National Geographic Magazine” and the rebuilding of miles of grasslands in the Lordsburg Playa in southwestern New Mexico for which she was awarded a 2023 National Geographic Explorer storyteller grant.
The mud buildings of Djenné suit their environment with thick walls that make cool interior spaces. The torrential downpours of the rainy season ravage the mud, however, and it needs to be replenished each year. Esha describes the work as “a slippery, messy scene with mud flying in all directions, people yelling instructions, kids laughing, people chanting – community chaos at its best.” Esha was a Peace Corps volunteer in Mali in 1997-1999.
She notes different conditions at Lordsburg. “In the late 1880s, when settlers founded Lordsburg in Southwestern New Mexico, a sea of grass tickled their horses' bellies and provided ample feed for their growing herds of livestock. By 2015, cattle had eaten the grass to the ground, and dust storms frequently enveloped Interstate 10, causing over 40 fatalities along a 20-mile stretch of highway since 1965.”
The entire community comes together to remud the Great Mosque and a handful of people are working with government agencies to restore the tickling grass of Lordsburg.
In both cases, in addition to the work itself, Esha is captivated by the people doing the work. Her photographs are “stories of hope, people doing things to shift our direction.”
We spoke at length about photography as fine art. At various points in my career I’ve beat the drum for photography as fine art and craft (pottery, glass, weaving, etc.) as fine art, including all of it in exhibitions of paintings drawings and sculpture. We couldn’t come up with a definition of “fine art” but agreed that Kathrine Erickson perhaps elevated documentary photography into that realm with the exhibition of Esha’s photographs, Restoring Earth’s Canvas, in 2023.
Esha did come close to a definition, though, when she said, “Fine art for me is an image that has an engaging power to it such that a person wants to linger on that image.”
Among the photographs in the exhibition was First Tracks II, an aerial shot from her drone showing the erosion of the playa and a mysterious patterned ribbon along the top of the image. The photo is an intimate 6 x 9” pigment print with Moon Gold leaf on archival Mylar.
Moon Gold leaf is a blend of gold, silver and palladium with a softer color than gold leaf made with gold and copper. She explains that it “gives the land a luminance worthy of its profound importance to our collective future.”
The mysterious patterned ribbon is the mark making of Gordon Tooley, one of the three dedicated environmentalists working to restore the Playa. He is the proprietor of Tooley’s Trees and Keyline Design in Truchas, NM. His mark making takes place in three stages: first, he recontours the land with a keyline plow that oxygenates the soil, then uses a seeder and then an imprinter that makes pockmarks to capture rainfall.
When I asked her why, among a predominantly black and white exhibition, her portraits of the environmentalists were in color, she immediately replied that “these are colorful people and Gordon was wearing a deep red flannel shirt”.
Mike Gaglio owns High Desert Native Plants, in El Paso, TX, and selected gamma grasses, alkali sacaton, fourwing saltbush and len-scale saltbush for the project, all suited to the harsh terrain.
Van Clothier owns Stream Dynamics in Silver City, NM, and works to restore damaged watersheds. In her article on Esha and the Lordsburg project for “Evokation”, Kate Nelson quotes Van Clothier: “We work seamlessly together. We work, we camp, we have yummy food. We have beautiful sunrises and sunsets. We’ve watched rains and storms, seen the tremendous success of the project—and we’re having the time of our lives out there.”
Esha has a Master of Arts degree in Sustainable Communities from Goddard College. “I was interested in sustainable communities,” she explains, “investigating how do we regenerate the earth and make it beautiful and whole. But, photography kept calling me back to it after my husband and I raised our family. It feeds my soul on a certain level. I want to tell stories—stories of hope and of people doing things to shift our direction.”
Mike Gaglio summed up Esha’s talent in Kate Nelson’s essay: “This is a tough site to be on. It takes a special person to see the beauty. It takes work. Esha’s pictures are so deep. There’s such a soul to them.”
“Another photo in the exhibition was Morning Train, a color, archival pigment print, 40-inches wide of the Playa after a rain. Esha says “The train image needs to be large to be read properly. I got up early and went out to see what was going on. There was fog that morning and a train was passing in the distance. It was trains that opened up the land for ranchers and allowed them to get their cattle out to market. Heavy grazing consequently caused the grasslands to virtually disappear.”
Explaining her documentary work of people around the world, she says, “When I’m photographing someone, I immerse myself in their world and ask questions. Basically, I want to shine love on them. I want them to feel seen and that their work is important. The world should be interested in what they do. I choose subjects that interest me and people who have stories that the world needs to hear. My hope is to photograph people in a way that love comes through.”
Andrew Wyeth, a fine artist whose work was often dismissed as illustration, said, “One's art goes as far and as deep as one's love goes."