Chinn Wang & Libby Barbee, Alexis Clement, Terri Bell
On view from 3/9 – 4/20 // Nalanda & White Cube // 6287 Arapahoe Ave.
Libby Barbee reveals her collection of work in Taming This Most Unruly Nature, offering her own exploration of female relationships with both nature and American culture. Drawing on personal inspiration from own life and female role models, Barbee uses imagery of gardens to evoke ideas of community, tradition, and complexity. Barbee overlays bold colors of various prints and designs on unique wooden cut-outs that have been intertwined together. These shapes and lines display an element of connectivity and influences that different personalities have created over time.
Chinn Wang’s Soaking Up Local Color, explores personal experiences, history, and the nature of memory. Using photographs taken of her mother when she first moved to the United States from Hong Kong, Chinn removes figures through some of the photographs intentionally, to tell the story of her mother and highlight the loss of self and cultural identity that immigrants often face. These photographs are paired with Wang’s S.A.D. series, a collection of screen printed silhouettes reflecting the artist’s experience with motherhood. The prints reveal the layered sense of self and complexity of parenthood. Wang’s and Barbee’s artistic vision complement each other in a powerful experience that allows for a rich and evocative visual conversation to be presented.
Alexis Clements showing Last in the Woods illuminates a sense of mystery and intrigue surrounding melancholic nostalgia staged in a wood landscape. She uses photography and written narratives to capture a poetic longing evocative of complexities between childhood and adulthood. Alexis Clements exploration of the merging of memory and reality intrigues viewers to ponder experiences of the past, present, and what the human mind creates in different circumstances.
Terri Bell’s exhibit When the Trellises Break is an intriguing combination of photography, mixed media, and creative writing. Her works portrays elements reminiscent of the past, each work layered with deep meaning and memory. Terri Bell’s work has a complexity of organized shapes and texture, combined with text which unravels stories of the nature of time, fragility, and hope. These themes pair well alongside Alexis Clements’ work, as the two artists have created an intimate story which allows for viewers to find unexpected connections.
by Sophie Pilmenstein, BFA in Visual Arts, gallery assistant
