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.

What a paradox is a paradox!   At once a pain and a prompt to creative imagination. 

My latest paintings are an investigation into the potential of paradox to deepen the experience of looking, feeling and ultimately knowing oneself.  Paradox is a new pair of glasses through which to view reality. The tension paradoxes produce can be fuel for insight.  Much like the Hegelian dialectical process—thesis, antithesis, synthesis—a paradox may consist of two seemingly contradictory ideas, propositions, feelings or meanings.  It’s the wrestling with this dissonance, the holding and weighing of opposing thoughts, feelings or meanings simultaneously that can produce a synthesis, a thrilling tension, or a new understanding.

Improvisational abstraction, the painting process I employ, is itself paradoxical.  It’s a practice that aims to illuminate experience by starting in the wholly unknown— no pre-thought design for the images.   It’s an approach to painting that—at its best— reveals reality by concealing it, splintering it, translating it into relationships of color, form, gesture, line and texture.  It’s a process that results in visual and intellectual puzzles, and through this tension, aims to reveal a deeper truth.

The attentive viewer may uncover multiple forms of paradox within my images and titles.  As always, my work invites you to locate yourself within the world of the image, to let the eye, mind and heart travel freely to places that challenge or soothe, pose questions and offer possible answers — perhaps a different question and answer at each viewing.

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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.