Reflecting on current events, and the rise of a new totalitarian aesthetic, in Signs of Dissent, Blackfish artists respond with a month long affirmation of cultural resilience and artistic freedom.

Building out of the long tradition of artist-as-activist, Signs of Dissent addresses both emergent political threats, and the often longstanding structures that empower them. Confronting the reemergence of 20th century specters of xenophobia and ultranationalist authoritarianism, Signs of Dissent reasserts the power of art in shaping the future.

This purposeful and engaging exhibition is accompanied by a month of community engagement and cultural programing, where Blackfish Gallery will host a series workshops and performances. Complimenting the work and building the frameworks for action, these collaborations embrace the strength and passion of creative resistance.

TO VIEW THE WORK ON DISPLAY, 

PLEASE CLICK HERE!

Embracing its ironic title, Ellen Goldschmidt's new exhibition, Pardon My Paradoxes beckons viewers into a colorful world of contradictions. Among the exhibition's paradoxes are pictures that invite multiple reads. In one painting, for example, suggestions of an underground root system may equally be read as a towering highway. In another, granite-toned rock formations vie with flesh-colored strata that suggest viscera, producing a paradoxical conflation of the outer and inner. This push and pull of overlapping interpretations is heightened by the artist's seductive use of color, which provides a gateway into her complex, richly-layered abstractions.

Goldschmidt builds her images out of acrylic paint, collage and acrylic marker in a process of improvisational abstraction that favors discovery over planning. This open-ended approach culminates in images that display a delicate balance of disparate parts, and compositions that find unity in asymmetry. Taken together, her exhibition reveals that the tension produced by paradox can enhance a viewer's enjoyment of looking and perhaps lead to a greater acceptance of the incongruities of a bewildering world.

FOR MORE ABOUT ELLEN AND HER WORK, 

PLEASE CLICK HERE!

Koyaanisqatsi is a Hopi word that means “life out of balance.” In this exhibit, Don Bailey presents 6 works that tell stories of Native American people who have protested and resisted the laws and policies that are at the root of the imbalance psychologists call “generational trauma:” the wars that led to the loss of land, the reservation system that stripped Native people of traditional ways of living, the assimilation policies that required Native children to attend boarding schools and outlawed their language and cultural practices, and the termination and relocation policies of the mid-twentieth century that further reduced Native land and encouraged Native people to move to cities. With vibrantly colorful oil paintings and mixed media pieces, Bailey presents a portrait of Native warrior and peace leader Quanah Parker, a painting in the style of an art form developed by incarcerated of Native leaders, a mother facing the removal of her child to boarding school, and works that tell of individual and organized acts of protest.

FOR MORE ABOUT DON AND HIS WORK, 

PLEASE CLICK HERE!