Jody Guralnick
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February 1 - March 16, 2024
IN THE NEWS
Nancy Hoffman Gallery will present an exhibition of paintings by artist Jody Guralnick from February 1 through March 16, 2024. This will be her first exhibition with Nancy Hoffman Gallery. The exhibition will include approximately 15 works, made between 2022 and the present. Works in the exhibition range from 12 x12 inches up to 60 x 144 inches.
The paintings depict the winding patterns that lichen forms on rocks, as well as the branching hyphal patterns of fungal growth. The lichen, painted in acrylic in rich and alluring impasto, stands in bas-relief against an oil background evocative of nature’s palette.
Guralnick says: “As muses go, yeast, mold, mushrooms, and lichen have a lot to offer. When fungus grows, it casts these lacy mycelial threads. It’s so baroque and over the top.” Guralnick paints these ornate, “over the top” alluring patterns in her latest series.
Guralnick moved to Aspen, Colorado in the mid 80’s after nine years in New York where she was intrigued by the detritus of the City: cigarette packs, paper scraps, litter, etc. When she moved to Aspen, she realized “the woods have a different type of litter.” Thus began her lifelong fascination with and commitment to nature as well as scientific studies. The microscopic universes she discovered at her feet became fodder for dissection and categorizing. The intricate patterns and ecosystems invited close examination. The ephemeral nature of nature itself, its cycle of growth, deterioration and rebirth became a metaphor for life and its fragility in the artist’s hands.
She is a Master Naturalist specializing in lichen with the Forest Conservancy in Aspen. Her Conservancy studies inform and inspire her new paintings, which look closely at complex networks, symbiotic relationships and processes that occur throughout nature, which she transforms into beguiling abstract paintings that appear to suggest another universe.
Her studio is brim-full of lichen, mushrooms, bits she finds on the slopes as she hikes trails; along with paintings that spring from these natural treasures. While the paintings are not portraits of her collections from the ground, what she sees and studies is the springboard for the works on canvas.
Jody Guralnick / Statement / October 2023
As an artist I attempt to serve as intermediary, merging many worlds: the world of insects, animals, plants, fungi, microbes and the man-made. I invite indoors the creations of the outdoors in order to form a new hybrid made by hand, paw and claw.
I am engaged in a partnership with these materials, alternately transforming, observing, seed saving, elucidating. I am studying them botanically, naming, categorizing. By using both the tools of science and art I hope to explicate 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, I am making hybrids that speak of both past present and future.
In my practice, I attempt to collaborate with the world rather than create something with no past, no history. My work is about dissection and classification in order to transform, to disrupt in order to know, to join two things that do not easily cohabitate.
This 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.
I am not taming wilderness, I am making new introductions.