Organic Barriers, Natural Windows
“Organic Barriers, Natural Windows” is a show I curated at The Foundry Coffee House gallery in Tyler, Texas featuring work by artists Lauren Careese Alexander and Jordan Bennet.
The show is concerned with displaying how natural imagery and organic elements can serve as a means of communicating human emotion in an artwork. Specifically, this show highlights the ways in which painter Jordan Bennett of Athens and ceramicist Lauren Careese Alexander of Dallas utilize similar imagery in contrasting ways in their work. Alexander utilizes nature iconography in her sculptures to speak to her thoughts and emotions while Bennett uses similar imagery in her paintings as a means of hiding her emotions. The show title, “Organic Barriers, Natural Windows,” serves to highlight the artists’ contrasting approaches to the incorporation of natural imagery in tackling human emotions. Bennett addresses this by specifically choosing to cover the eyes and most of the faces in her paintings, creating an emotional barrier between the subject and the viewer. However, Bennett uses the organic barriers she creates in her work to symbolically overwhelm the figure, thus ultimately drawing attention to human emotion after all, specifically how negative thoughts, feelings, and anxieties can overwhelm a person. Alexander utilizes natural imagery in a more direct way, allowing the imagery of her sculptures to reveal her feelings. Each sculpture begins as a cloud, a symbol of home for her, as she finds comfort in looking at the sky when away and knowing that those clouds likely passed over her home city. Alexander utilizes a variety of iconography to decorate these cloud sculptures and address feelings of nostalgia, memory, anxiety, and restlessness.
What is inspiring about these artists’ works is the optimism and peacefulness they embody. While both artists are addressing negative thoughts and feelings, they do so in a positive way. The works are brightly colored and beautiful to look at, and the artists address emotions in an empowering way. Bennett highlights the ways negative thoughts can overwhelm someone in hopes that her work draw attention to mental health and Alexander chooses to address her feelings of homesickness by instead turning her attention to fond memories of home and the warm feelings of nostalgia that bring her comfort.