Pop Up For Sunsets
September 20 - September 23, 2024
Zone 7A
Provincetown, MA
David Billet
Eileen Emond
Matt Grubb
Nabil Harb
Ian Kline
Alex Nelson
Jake Reinhart
Curated + Text by Ian Kline
September 20 - September 23, 2024
Zone 7A
Provincetown, MA
David Billet
Eileen Emond
Matt Grubb
Nabil Harb
Ian Kline
Alex Nelson
Jake Reinhart
Curated + Text by Ian Kline
Here we are at the end of September. The peak season is coming to an end, the days die faster alongside the leaves. The summer crowds leave, vanishing back to their gray metropolitan graveyards in their large SUV’s. The wasped blood college kids who filled the restaurants, kitchens, and midnight fires for the Summer between semesters migrate back to the dorms and books. Business’s prepare for the silence of waves crashing and light spitting out from a tower to the Atlantic void, signaling to something not yet seen. But as the sand impresses less footprints and the warm light ends preparing itself the long nap, sunsets remain for the selected ones who rise from cold shadows. Photography like the off season, is a bastard time inhabited by only a few, feeding on the scarce vital essence of the living, light.
The subjects in this landscape - dunes, waves, sailboats, salted fisherman, sunsets - are typically depicted through painting on Sundays. Viewed by the escaping flesh when nailed in salon style in a small, old white wood space, hoping to be taken to a new home off the peninsula. These marks of pigment and light become about craft, execution and attempting to express beauty where language may not be enough, or when there is a desire to escape language. Which, when thought about in those select terms, is not too different than what the artists in this exhibition - David Billet, Eileen Emond, Matt Grubb, Nabil Harb, Ian Kline, Alex Nelson, and Jake Reinhart - are all after at the core; caring about craft, working with a set of tools with specific limitations, hoping to share, but looking against the world in order to create something new from pulsating blood, imagination, and reinterpretation rather than accepting the light as it is.
But what about voice? What about screaming? Impressions of sunsets and sailboats are Sirens, loaring us in closer as we become comfortable, complacent, distracted, only to crash into the event thought to be welcoming. The lore of the songs coming from the rocks, for us - the viewer who is able to leave - is to forget, to not think much more about an image outside of beauty, serving as a reason to forget the thoughts of looming doom at this end of the world; to not think much more about the terrors both inside us and surrounding us once the sun sets, turning the landscape twilight, shadows still breathing ready to hunt. So, what happens when the lighthouse fails, what happens when you're in the passenger seat next to a murderer, what happens after the shift ends, what happens when someone slips a pill into your cup at an elite pool party, what happens when the secret service notices you staring from across the bay? Will you even notice yourself drowning when you are only focused on beauty? Will you be able to scream when images are silent? Will you be able to see the light in the night?
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The subjects in this landscape - dunes, waves, sailboats, salted fisherman, sunsets - are typically depicted through painting on Sundays. Viewed by the escaping flesh when nailed in salon style in a small, old white wood space, hoping to be taken to a new home off the peninsula. These marks of pigment and light become about craft, execution and attempting to express beauty where language may not be enough, or when there is a desire to escape language. Which, when thought about in those select terms, is not too different than what the artists in this exhibition - David Billet, Eileen Emond, Matt Grubb, Nabil Harb, Ian Kline, Alex Nelson, and Jake Reinhart - are all after at the core; caring about craft, working with a set of tools with specific limitations, hoping to share, but looking against the world in order to create something new from pulsating blood, imagination, and reinterpretation rather than accepting the light as it is.
But what about voice? What about screaming? Impressions of sunsets and sailboats are Sirens, loaring us in closer as we become comfortable, complacent, distracted, only to crash into the event thought to be welcoming. The lore of the songs coming from the rocks, for us - the viewer who is able to leave - is to forget, to not think much more about an image outside of beauty, serving as a reason to forget the thoughts of looming doom at this end of the world; to not think much more about the terrors both inside us and surrounding us once the sun sets, turning the landscape twilight, shadows still breathing ready to hunt. So, what happens when the lighthouse fails, what happens when you're in the passenger seat next to a murderer, what happens after the shift ends, what happens when someone slips a pill into your cup at an elite pool party, what happens when the secret service notices you staring from across the bay? Will you even notice yourself drowning when you are only focused on beauty? Will you be able to scream when images are silent? Will you be able to see the light in the night?
