SQUARING THE SUN
SQUARING THE SUN features works by Beverly Acha, Paolo Arao, Will Hutnick, Katy Krantz, Max Manning, Kate McQuillen, Jason Rohlf, and Jessica Simorte. The artists in this selection explore color as a perceptual force that activates deeply personal language.

Beverly Acha constructs archways, portals, and wave forms in color palettes that offer vibrant contrast and subtle gradients. The resulting images exist in a transient state between the ‘here’ of a luminous foreground and the ‘there’ of an interior landscape. Paolo Arao’s paintings, fabric collages, and drawings use geometric abstraction to examine the infinite potentials of queerness. Arao’s design fluency is combined with a sense of play to create works across media that are simultaneously stable and evolving. Will Hutnick brings together wide ranging materials and processes into works that feel grafted together. This hybrid approach informs Hutnick’s color and surfaces, which are both entirely personal and wholly contingent on the needs of the work.

Katy Krantz’s ceramic vessels and works on paper feature surfaces that allow the viewer to retrace the artist’s hand across layers of translucent washes and glazing. These overlapping elements come from Krantz’s rigorous embrace of chance, and function as discoveries for artist and viewer alike. Max Manning’s paintings nimbly move between the improvisational and art historical. For Manning, color is a significant part of this dialogue, as compositions come together and split apart through graphic forms and amorphous glazes. The resulting works are products of direct action that make space for imperfection without sentimentality. Kate McQuillen’s work places shapes in color fields, with both elements appearing as though they are equally embedded in the surface. The initial stillness in McQuillen’s work gently dissolves as optical shifts parallel the viewer’s movements.

Jason Rohlf’s shop rag paintings feel like studio star maps – records of an intuitive and unfolding navigation charted with color, pattern, and material. By balancing repetition with idiosyncrasies, Rohlf’s meditative shop rags widen the space between call and response. Jessica Simorte’s works contain forms in relative states of stillness, attraction, distance, and collision. Through color that feels inextricable from its corresponding mark, Simorte discovers and articulates each element’s purpose, and pushes the boundaries of abstraction into placemaking.
 
SQUARING THE SUN is organized by Jessica Cannon, and marks the fifth 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 4/10/18 – 5/20/18 and any sales from this grouping will be split 50% to the artist and 50% to Human Rights Campaign, which works to achieve lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer equality.