The Myrtle Creek Paintings

Steve Ward

February 4-25, 2012

Twist Art Gallery

Steve Ward’s paintings feature ambiguous scenes of terrestrial alien visitation. Often blocked into two or three different visual fields, the works featured in The Myrtle Creek Paintings seem to express various aspects of the other-worldly event taking place, from the fleeting moment of a UFO citation to the varied reactions of the onlookers, who range from a man in a tin foil hat to a meandering cow. The dark tones and broken facture of the skies in these paintings imbues them with an ominous feeling that engenders a fear of the event’s actuality within the viewer; however, this fear is balanced by the humorous absurdity of the human and animal subjects’ wide-eyed countenances.

Steve Ward is an artist in Murfreesboro, Tenn. where he lives with a philosopher wife, three dogs, three chickens, one cat, and a garden that always needs weeding. He has a Masters of Fine Art from Southern Illinois University, has taught art, and has shown his work both regionally and nationally.

Artist's Statement:

These paintings are about the desires involved in the tales of secret contracts made in plausibly denied military bases, almond eyes of deep telepathic blackness, and hypnotically triggered recountings of time scattered abductions. They make no judgment as to the veracity or soundness of the claims they represent, but are insistent about the sincerity of those who make them.

The Garden of Evolution

Lori Anne Parker-Danley

February 4-25, 2012

Twist Etc.

Lori Anne Parker-Danley’s work also addresses a sense of otherness, not of an extraterrestrial nature, but of our own physical existence. The works featured in The Garden of Evolution attempt to evoke the phenomenology of human corporeality and its relationship with biological materiality. After she underwent emergency heart surgery in 2009, Parker-Danley was shown a photo of her own heart that the surgeon had taken during the procedure. “Seeing my own heart was akin to seeing my animality: the image of my heart in my cut-open chest, which could have been anybody’s heart in any cut-open chest, was jarring to me because of its biological anonymity,” Parker-Danely recounts. It was me, but beyond me—the experience of looking into a mirror and staring at a stranger.”

In addition to oil, graphite, and charcoal, some of the paintings in the series include elements such as cat fur, twigs, cicada exoskeletons, human hair, orchids, foliage, moss, snakeskins and sculpted paper. The use of various nontraditional media is another way of expressing the subject matter of the work itself, generally the connections, transformations, and relationships between natural life forms that are part of the evolutionary process. In honor of National Go Red month and the American Heart Association, Parker-Danley will be “going red” by donating 10 percent of the artist proceeds from exhibition sales to Go Red for Women.

Lori Anne Parker-Danley is a Nashville-based artist with a Ph.D. in philosophy from Binghamton University. As a national spokesperson for the American Heart Association’s Go Red for Women campaign since 2010 and a woman who had two heart attacks and bypass surgery at the age of 38 in 2009, Parker-Danley has been using her art as a way to help get the word out about the risks of heart disease in women.

Artist's Statement:

Broadly conceived, The Garden of Evolution is an attempt to evoke the phenomenology of human corporeality, its relationships with the non-human natural world, and its place in the history of evolution. The exhibition and series of paintings by the same title are inspired by questions of human/biological materiality that have interested me as an artist and philosopher for many years, as well as the life-saving, emergency heart surgery I underwent in 2009, which focused my attention on these questions in a more profound, directly personal way. One of the most intense moments that happened in the days after my surgery was the experience of seeing my own heart (My surgeon took a picture of it with his iPhone during my operation). Seeing my own heart was akin to seeing my animality: the image of my heart in my cut-open chest, which could have been “anybody’s” heart in any cut-open chest, was jarring to me because of its biological anonymity. The heart I saw was “mine,” but I could never know as my own. It was me, but beyond me—the experience of looking into a mirror and staring at a stranger.

To see one’s own heart is an invitation to notice the repetition of forms, to hear the echo that beats in the chests of a billion others, to understand that there is nothing special or significant or even that original about your own heart even though it is necessary for you to live. To see one’s own heart is also an opportunity—to see through it, past it, to notice and recall patterns—such as the chambers of a human heart alongside the heart of a feline or the spiraling twist of the human inner ear alongside the curves of a buoyant nautilus or the branches of alveoli in the lungs of a rabbit that might remind one of a copse of trees. Repeating forms evoke our connections and common origin, our shared animal-plant biology. Repeating forms invite us to contemplate our existence as part of the material world and the fact that human life is but a single, small, beautiful moment in a much larger 4.5 billion-year planetary history. The Garden of Evolution is the place we all begin and a place where everything is made of stardust. The Garden of Evolution is also a dream, the other side of waking life, the strangeness that is familiar, and the constant striving where forms both old and new emerge, mingle, and transform yet again.

The paintings in this exhibition are a departure from much of my past work in terms of their increased expressiveness and the materials I’ve used. While working on this project, I have tried to simply release myself to the muscularity of the gesture and the physicality of paint. I am after paintings that aren’t representations of bodies but highly physical, bodily moments in and of themselves. This effort has drawn me to new materials: in addition to oil, graphite, and charcoal, some of the paintings in the series include elements such as cat fur, twigs, cicada exoskeletons, human hair, orchids, foliage, moss, snakeskins, and sculpted paper. Instead of using these materials to “augment” the paintings, my intention is to put these additional materials and objects in conversation with the paint and make them part of (or a continuation of) my gestures and brushstrokes. The use of various nontraditional media is also another way of expressing the subject matter of the work itself, generally the connections, transformations, and relationships between natural life forms that are part of the evolutionary process.

The exhibition at Twist Etc. has been an opportunity to push my work even further in direct response to the particular environment of the gallery space. As such, The Garden of Evolution is not simply an exhibit of paintings, but a larger on-site, multimedia art installation that includes the paintings, additional objects and effects, and a sound composition by Nashville-based guitarist and composer John Danley: Another evolution.