Jody Guralnick
PRESS RELEASE
Skye Gallery Aspen is pleased to announce its second solo exhibition of new works by Jody Guralnick. Featuring paintings and sculpture, On The Brink opens Friday, August 31 and will remain on view through September 30, 2021. An opening reception will be held on Friday, August 30 from 5:00 p.m. until 8:00 p.m.
E.O. Wilson defines the Biophilia Hypothesis as “the urge to affiliate with other forms of life.” As an artist and citizen scientist, Jody Guralnick’s work strives to speak through the myriad languages of Algae and Fungi, the great creators and dissemblers of our world that hide in plain sight. The Aspen-based artist seeks to observe, to study, to wonder and then to make large and visible the building blocks that help to shape our world. Through approaching the canvas as a collage of mycelial connectors, Guralnick examines networks of fungi and plants not always visible to the naked eye. This practice calls attention to the overlooked thing, urging us to look at the micro and macro of what our life forms are built upon.
On the Brink marks a compilation of the artist’s paintings made for a solo exhibition at the Denver Botanic Gardens’, as well as work completed during an Artist Residency at RedLine Contemporary Art Center earlier this summer. The work explores our innate connection to plant life, focusing on the specific organisms that find a way to thrive and grow in a world impacted by climate change and hostile forces. From plants thriving in urban environments to those in high-altitude wilderness, Guralnick’s paintings gesture to the life that finds a foothold in our current environment. Through an accretion of small marks, larger systems are simulated and transcribed onto the canvas. A dotting of pollen mimics a bacterial colony then mimics the dots behind our eyeballs. It is this enormous system’s symbiotic partnerships that, for the artist, both form and dissemble our world.
As an artist Jody Guralnick attempts to serve as intermediary, merging many worlds: the world of insects, animals, plants, fungi, microbes and the man-made. She invites indoors the creations of the outdoors in order to form a new hybrid made by hand, paw and claw.
She is engaged in a partnership with these biotic materials, alternately transforming, observing, seed saving, elucidating. She uses both the tools of science and art in hopes of explicating a time and place in three dimensions. A time and place that is rapidly undergoing climatic change, social change, change at the human level and change planet wide.
By applying traditional rules of taxonomy overlaid with new combinations, she creates hybrids that speak of both past present and future.
In her work, she attempts to collaborate with the world rather than create something with no past, no history. It is about dissection and classification in order to transform, to disrupt in order to know, to join two things that do not easily cohabitate.
Her work is about memory and amnesia, mosses and lichens and fungi, alchemical plants and the rapture of the tiny. It is about amazement, longing, definition, and comprehension. It is about the forgotten detail, and blurring the line between the microscopic and the macroscopic. It is about shock and the quotidian, just as it is about the space where nature and domesticity rub up against each other. I try to work at the point where two worlds touch; where there is a call, and a response.
She is not taming wilderness, she is making new introductions.
