Opening Friday, February 12th
6-11pm
Here It Is: Clowns, Dead People, and the Theater.
Fifty-two paintings by Douglass Truth.
We living beings at some ease in our overly-constructed realities sometimes need a little shock to wake us up to the bigger reality we’re always in whether we realize it or not. I’m not an artist who sets out to shock anyone simply to do so; there are too many such artists at any given moment. Shock for its own sake is little more than annoying; more noise and less signal.
My premise is that we living beings constrict our reality based on ancient habits and even more ancient genes; we make a seemingly safe little world which we inhabit as the central and crucial character. But the worlds of the non-living and the non-human continue to exist whether we pretend otherwise or not. What are our entry points into these other realms? I don’t propose to enumerate and in so doing limit the possible doorways. They are in fact limitless, since we’re talking about a living and evolving universe; it’s alive and evolving through and with us.
In my paintings, the harlequin, the clown, and other, more mysterious (to me) characters show up to show us, in ways difficult to articulate in our normal linguistic fashion, in which direction we might be coming from and going to. To encourage us to take a deeper look, not into the fashionable recreations of the underworlds that can be found without looking very hard, but into what’s really going on around us in the corner grocery store, our kitchen, our place of work, the cities in which we somehow, miraculously, find ourselves living.