PERPETUAL AND NOCTURNAL

Works by Fiona Buchanan, Chris Daharsh & Anthony Palocci Jr.
Curated by Georgia Hourdas

Magic is discovered and born anew with each person living on earth in perpetuity. There is an undisputed ethereal quality that exists in the night. It is in the pregnancy of night that magic originates.  The work in this show celebrates the mysteries of the corners of the soul, from the twilight time of sunset to the darkness of the witching hour, through into the clarity of dawn.

As the sun sets, the world is thrown into a velvet blanket of silence and distortion. Since the human eye has not developed the ability to see in the dark quite as well as our animal relatives, nothing is as it seems in the dead of night. That which was familiar in the light of day is contorted and made strange by nightfall. Shadows shift forms from the known into the obscure. The moon, pale and cold, lights what it can, leaving the rest to our imagination. Objects grow curious, signs become illegible and natural textures reign. The new strangeness of the world imbues mundanity with an everlasting arcane significance.

Of course there is a very real danger lurking in the witching hour. Suffused (infused) with the potency of night magic, there is a  mortal challenge that can make or break one’s eternal being. One must make it to the dawn of a new day following a treacherous dark night of the soul. It is said that shadows will creep in at the periphery of one’s vision whispering their nightmarish temptations, attempting to snuff out that divine light we share as a species. It is up to the individual to dispel these corruptions through the focus of one’s eyes and sheer will of spirit, in order to emerge more whole, more resplendent than before. 

In Palocci’s work we see the sun retreating from a large swath of land, giving away the last glimmer of its acidic green gaze to the pervasive black night. In this painting the field descends into the dark, quietly knowing and preparing for the cycle to begin. Once the sun is gone, our eyes searching in the twilight find the detritus of man is left in textural assemblages – much like the work of Christopher Daharsh. These sculptural objects seem pitted and pock-marked. Bruised and Barnacled.

Buchanan’s midnight valley of blank facades leads us into a dream world where the viewer can explore a mysterious sacred carnival of spirit across the work’s rolling hills. While Fiona’s other paintings are shown in an idyllic daytime they suggest what one may witness at the end of a spell. Buchanan’s multicolored grasses are uncanny, like lingering illusions changing into dawn.