Opening Reception: Saturday, April 1, 2023, 6-8pm
It’s Happening Again
by Taylor Mathues
BIO
Taylor Mathues was born and raised in New Jersey and currently resides in Stanton, NJ. She attended Mason Gross School of the Arts and graduated in 2015 with a BFA in photography. Since then her work has been on display in multiple group exhibitions across the US and Europe. In 2018, she had her first solo exhibition where she exhibited her most recent body of work titled It’s Happening Again. Her work explores inner struggles with darkness, anxiety, and the unknown. She is heavily influenced by artists such as Francesca Woodman, Marianna Rothen, and David Lynch.
Artist Statement
It’s Happening Again is a deeply personal non-linear narrative that explores the inner struggles of anxiety, darkness, depression, trauma, and healing. This series is entirely made up of self-portraits that depict ones experience with mental illness.
The series began in November of 2016 as a response to my first panic attack in four years. For four years I had believed that I was “cured”, that I would never suffer from anxiety again. But it happened. And a few months later it happened again. And a few weeks later it happened again. And as time passed I continued to have panic attacks more and more frequently until it was eventually happening on a daily basis. At that point, I was forced to face my shadow and start therapy on a regular basis again.
I could not believe that this was happening again. For months I felt helpless. For months I felt an uncontrollable chaos residing in my mind. For months I hoped I would get better and my mind would “go back to normal,” whatever normal was. As time went on I noticed that I was slowly getting stronger, but I also noticed that my anxiety was never fully gone. It was my shadow. Although it was not always visually present, it was always in the back of my mind. It was always right behind me.
I am interested in the way ones mind works. I am interested in the darkness that people can feel and fear. I am interested in the memories we choose to hold onto and the stories we never fail to forget. I am interested in the fears that haunt us, and the desires we crave.
This body of work is heavily influenced by psychoanalyst Carl Jung and his theory of the shadow self, as well as artists such as Francesca Woodman, Marianna Rothen, Brittany Market, David Lynch, and Duane Michals.
Association of Identification
by Kasia Pasterkiewicz
The sea and the ocean life represent to me the formlessness, the unfathomable, and the chaotic patterns found in our world. In this mission to paint what these elements hold has taken me on a journey into flow. The state of mind where you’re able to allow what comes through, seeing the innate opportunity to let go of control. This entirely of work is embodied with intuition and inner understanding to form mind scapes from my own imagination. The everlasting currents crash and mend back together, like a painting formlessly forming.
Artist Statement
Formlessly Forming in the eyes of worlds and vessels.
Expressionist experimenting with the interaction and inter-connectivity between intuition, visions, and emotions through the art making process. I see my inner world transferring to my study into a deeper knowledge of the world around me and how I connect to my message I want to reflect. To return to a new way of seeing is to conjure the possibility of what could be from what is or was, through the eyes of different worlds and personal vessels of exploration. I see the world as a platform of discovery, transcending human understandings/ misunderstandings into conscience state of art. I work with many mediums such as painting, drawing, ceramics, and dance. My art is followed by a process-based method, creating its form while forming an intuitive balance of the unconscious mind. I like to use automatic drawing and painting to assemble a stream of consciousness throughout the journey of making. I have become interested in the knowledge behind symbols, dreams, memories, sensations, and intuition and how art shows our remembrance of self, others and the world around us. Some of my favorite artists that have inspired me are Remedious Varo, Georgia O’ Keefe, Yves Tanguy, Olga Spiegel, Willem de Kooning and Hilma Af Klint, and Matisse. These artists all have a quality that expresses a vision of new worlds to be explored from their own mind. I prefer painting on a large scale to release energy and through the rest of the unfolding reveals the symbolized primordial dance of gestural expressing of itself though organic movements. A poetic approach to new relations between me and what feels like something close to knowing yet something expansive enough to ponder the various perspectives in which one can imagine or see, implementing a universal truth of subjectivity.
