Everyday Alchemy

Russo Lee Gallery</a> presents “Recent Paintings” by <a target="_blank" href=https://www.mutualart.com/Exhibition/Everyday-Alchemy/"/Artist/Roll-Hardy/8404E0AA09F90C73">Roll Hardy</a>. While exploring Portland and surrounding areas by bicycle, Hardy assembled this latest body of work. He states, “I chose subjects, and scenes that struck me in the moment with their gritty ephemeral beauty”. Building on his previous exploration of capturing the mysterious and the evocative, Hardy continues to paint marginal places that sit between somewhere and nowhere all at once.</p><p><br></p>" />

Chefas Projects</a> is delighted to present Book of Matches, a series of <a target="_blank" href=https://www.mutualart.com/Exhibition/Everyday-Alchemy/"/Artist/Nate-Ethington/7683D8508EC3C5B7">new paintings by Nate Ethington</a> for his first solo exhibition with the gallery. Employing a deeply layered process of hiding and revealing gestural marks and traces of handwriting, Book of Matches explores the poetics of connection and communication through the philosophy of a match.&nbsp;</p><p>For Ethington, the match – with its intense yet fleeting light – parallels the delicate dance of give and take in our encounters with others. The light of a match’s flame gives its user the opportunity to both reveal and perceive – sometimes serving as a beacon for reconnection, at other times acting as a cry for help. At the same time, that exact flame can be both life-giving as well as destructive in its potential to set things further ablaze.</p><p>Book of Matches pushes these notions of dualities and contradictions, of both carefully sharing and closely guarding one’s intimacies through its gestures of texture and mark making. Emphasizing intuitive compositions of thick impasto focal points over neutral fields of color, traces of written words and subtle scribbles suggest the haziness of fleeting thoughts and memories of conversations with no determinable beginning or end.</p><p><br></p>" />