Momentum Gallery opens 2023 with a collection of thoughtfully made, contemporary multimedia works from three artists inspired by nature and foliage. This exhibition continues on the gallery's first floor through Saturday, February 25.
About her Botanical Mandalas and Botanical Blueprints, Hillary Waters Fayle comments, "collected botanical material is meticulously dried and preserved, then arranged on and adhered to acrylic. Each leaf is placed with careful consideration in an intricate pattern, referencing the inherent patterns underlying everything in the natural world - echoed in our own lived experiences, and the interconnectivity of all things." The collection at Momentum also includes recent works from the artist's ongoing series of leaves and flower petals transformed through incising, arranged into thoughtful compositions, and hand-embroidered with geometric and floral patterns.
Amy Gross' hand-embroidered and beaded sculptures are magical microcosms, merging the natural world with her own inner life. Attracted and frightened by things on the edge of spoiling or straining to support an excess, the Florida artist creates vignettes that cluster, tangle, cling and multiply. Paradoxically, these vivid accounts of the natural world use nothing from nature. The current collection at Momentum includes a pair of Gross' remarkable oval wall pieces with dimensional elements, freestanding sculptural works presented under glass domes, and examples of her recent stereoscope project – you need to see these in person to truly appreciate!
Recently, Gross' work Flora Heredita was included in La Vie Enchevêtrée (The Entangled Life) at Fondation LAccolade - Institut de France in Paris at a new exhibition space located in the Marais. Additionally, people near the Asheville area can see Gross' work Flora Ruba included in Too Much is Just Right: The Legacy of Pattern and Decoration at the Asheville Art Museum February 3–May 29, 2023.
Ivy Jacobsen's paintings depict a wondrous world with meadows of diverse and fantastical plants and flowering trees laden with blooms. An eye for silhouette, combined with a refined sensibility for using texture and color emotively, defines Jacobsen's playful style. The artist creates depth and atmosphere through a complex layering process, providing a space within the works for viewers to explore. Jacobsen comments, "While I often times have a loose idea of the direction I'd like to go when starting a painting, it is very much through the process of working that the art informs and reveals itself. It is a balance of source materials coming directly from my observations of nature and intuitive mark making. The act of painting is meditative and it brings me a great sense of peace. It is my hope that this feeling radiates out of the work into the viewer."
