INDIGLO
Far x Wide is pleased to present INDIGLOfeaturing works by Catherine Haggarty, Shanan Kurtz, Emily Noelle Lambert, Paul Metrinko, Giordanne Salley, and Jack Arthur Wood. The title for this selection was inspired by a Giordanne Salley painting of an Indiglo watch in the woods at night. The image in Salley’s painting is nostalgic and slightly ominous. Indiglo watches are from a more private era – the 1990s, when digital technology was still new, and before cell phones could be heard ringing in the woods. However, taken from a painting in 2018, the Indiglo light feels like a harbinger of the smart phones to come, the alerts lighting up the dark, and ubiquitous digital cameras framing the natural world for memory and consumption. The artists in INDIGLO each bring an otherwordly light to their work, and often frame elements of the natural world with post-digital consciousness.

Catherine Haggarty’s paintings construct worlds that feel both foreign and familiar. References to antiquities and landscapes are collaged, cut, painted or airbrushed onto spaces that alternate between the lush and the perilous. Through formal and material improvisation, Haggarty’s works resist a particular narrative while retaining a deep connection to the physical, intellectual, and spiritual journey of painting. Shanan Kurtz places jewelry, domestic objects, and materials from her garden onto cyanotype paper to create ghostly silhouettes that are then digitally scanned into an expanding archive of forms and symbols. Drawing from this taxonomy, Kurtz rearranges the forms into poetic compositions that appear both fixed and disintegrating. Emily Noelle Lambert’s monoprints feel like depictions of an ecstatic night garden. Their supernatural colors and dark shadows hold each other in place for a moment, as expressive marks and background layers imply an imminent shift.

Paul Metrinko’s intimate hypersaturated drawings reimagine urban landmarks as personal icons. Expanding on a background in plein aire painting, it’s as though Metrinko’s drawings have passed through a filter that is equal parts Georgia O’Keefe and Big Lebowski. Giordanne Salley’s paintings explore projections of human emotion within the natural world. In End Of A Day, two hands are raised to block the sun’s light, an Indiglo watch attempting unsuccessfully to obscure the original timekeeper. Based in Texas, with an extensive background in printmaking, Jack Arthur Wood’s paintings use abstracted landscape imagery as a vehicle to explore queer identity. Often combining fragments of gradient with collage and repetitive marks, Wood’s paintings can feel like they’ve been channelled; inhabiting a time between night and day on the way to an ever-receding horizon.

INDIGLO is organized by Jessica Cannon, and marks the sixth presentation from Far x Wide, an ongoing project featuring monthly selections of artworks to benefit social and environmental justice organizations. Works will be available on farbywide.com from 5/21/18 – 7/1/18 and any sales from this grouping will be split 50% to the artist and 50% to Children’s Aid NYC, which works to help children in poverty succeed and thrive through education, health care, and family support programs.