Reception Date: Friday, April 8th, 2022, 5-7PM
Exhibition Dates: April 05 – April 16, 2022

Strata Gallery presents its fourth Emerging Member solo exhibition Tongues In Trees by California-based artist Mercy Hawkins. This exhibition opens April 5, 2022, with a special reception on Friday, April 8^th from 5-7PM and artist talk at 6PM.

Mercy Hawkins’ work seeks to reveal a new language, expanding a lexicon of the possible, as it relates to the sensorium of the living body, both in and as the natural world. Working within a craft-based manipulation and assemblage of varied materials, Hawkins pursues a return to a vital visual language, imbued with a living, responsive pulse of the world. Hawkins seeks to create work that is at once uncanny and unsettlingly alive. Creating forms and images of what we might encounter if language could return to its pre-literate origins, an experience potentially weaving our bodies with the land.

Hawkins says of her work “I think of the creation of art like music through an instrument. I process the world around me through my body and invite my viewers to participate in a slow dance with the work. I seek to retune the senses and recenter ourselves to reencounter questions such as where are we really, in relation to ourselves, each other, and the cosmos.”

Hawkins received her BA in from California State University, Sacramento with a minor in History and received her MFA from University of California, Davis in 2021. Presently she works at the Before Columbus Foundation in Oakland, CA, administrator of the American Book Award. She is currently a graduate fellow in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito CA and is featured in New American Paintings #153, MFA Annual.