Beauty of Stillness
at the InLiquid Gallery
1400  American Street
Philadelphia PA 19122

Crispness is in the air. A modest destabilization. Your jacket crossed tight to guard against a chilly wind. A confusion. Ennui. Loneliness. Autumn, though full of decay, has a marked beauty, like a poem written in longing. Like the season of fall itself, the four artists of The Beauty of Stillness conjure tender reflective moments that are marked by pangs of uncertainty, yearning,  and beauty.

In his work, Geoffrey Ansel Agrons memorializes scenes that are haunting and lonely, devoid of any recent mark of civilization. These are fleeting sites. Soon after Argons leaves, they vanish: the wind changes the shape of the snow bank, a scavenger carries off a carcass for a meal. The “melancholigraphs,” as he terms them, are all that remain to remember the moment by.

Also capturing nature through photography is Daria Panichas. Unlike Agrons, Panichas’ photographs are unrecognizable subjects in unrecognizable moments. Panichas shoots from non-traditional angles, from uncomfortably close, and cropped beyond recognizability. Her stark backgrounds recall chiaroscuro paintings and nod to the long history of memento mori. Simultaneously familiar and unsettlingly foreign, Panichas’ subjects highlight the nature that we are removed from, twisting it until only its beauty is recognizable.

Constance McBride alters nature and brings it into the gallery space to confront us with the reality that we as humans are removed from the natural world. Nature’s detritus, fallen limbs, shells of animals, and bones, are coated in white ceramic slip making them white and, pure, and suitable for a pristine, traditional gallery view.

Similar to McBrides’ desaturation, Richard Hricko’s practice alters nature to encourage us to better see its beauty. Hricko collects items that he sees in his daily life like weeds and litter from an abandoned lot across the street from his studio. He weaves these things together to create a tableau, which he then photographs and uses as the bases for his printmaking.

All these artists carefully balance the natural and artificial, the spontaneous and the curated.