“I communicate the dilemma of being through landscape. I bring my insides to bear on the outside and trepidation colors the scene. Broodingly, the atmosphere is thick, and the landscape psychedelically tinted like dawn, an eclipse, or a summer storm. Flora glows and becomes bulbous and fleshy, petal-like and feathery in the waning light. Reality is more than it seems. One follows the receding landscape out and away only to wash up again at the shores of one’s skin; hope; longing; loss. While building other worlds, the sense of my impermanence in an expansive, mysterious universe stretches out into broader context and I am free.”
De Novo, Dana Oldfather's second solo exhibition with Abattoir, opens on March 14th.
Opening reception 6 - 8pm.
Oldfather is a landscape painter whose work conjures the universal and specific at once, translating the browns and greens of Northeast Ohio’s forests into fervid otherworldly set pieces ripe with drama. Her paintings of dense forest, underbrush, and lush meadows vary in scale from intimate close-up to distant view, rendered in otherworldly palettes selected, it seems, to underscore the magical within Nature.
