J. Rinehart Gallery announces, our first Exhibition from multidisciplinary artist, painter and illustrator, Gala Bent.
(Seattle, WA) – January 9, 2023 – J. Rinehart Gallery is thrilled to announce our first exhibition from multidisciplinary artist, painter, and illustrator, Gala Bent. Her exhibition, The Garden at Night, explores the limits of our understanding through development and decomposition. Meditation on the brevity and preciousness of life lies within the realm of Bent’s exhibition. Dig your hands into the dirt and join us in The Garden at Night.
The Garden at Night will be on view online at www.jrinehartgallery.com and in the gallery February 2 – March 4, 2023, with the Opening Reception held in the gallery First Thursday, February 2nd from 5-8pm.
Walking through The Garden at Night there is a necessity to rely on other senses and approaches to make sense of a world that abounds in mystery. Many of us seek the wisdom that is right under our feet. At night, shapes are made from smells and sounds. Other creatures are at work. Seeds germinate in the dark. Plants live and they die. This is the gardener’s version of vanitas— transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death.
Tucked between flora and fauna in Bent's exhibition are moments of abstraction. Drawings of ropes and knots mimic crochet and point to the ways that we use fibers of plants, woven and pieced, to cover our own bodies. They also imply the cellular growth of plants and biological systems. The internal tending that takes place with these meditative drawings is not unlike the tending of a plot of ground, to clear weeds, to water, to fertilize, to make space for new growth.
Gala Bent received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Visual Arts from State University of New York at Buffalo (SUNY) Buffalo, New York in 1999 and has exhibited her work nationally ever since. Bent has been a finalist for the Neddy Award in 2012, and was awarded the Westfjords Residency, in Þingeri, Iceland in 2017. Her work can be found in the Microsoft Art Collection, the Jordan Schnitzer Print Collection, Portland, OR, and the Washington State Art Collection as well as many private collections in the US and beyond.
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