All are welcome to attend the gallery reception for Field Guide by Jude Akrey on Thursday August 13th from 6:00-8:00 pm!
Field Guides are illustrated publications intended to help readers identify wildlife and other natural phenomena. They are practical guidebooks designed to expand our understanding of the world around us. This exhibition appropriates the field guide to provide adaptive strategies for generating painterly images through alternative methodologies, and identify systemic and individual symptoms of burnout through creative attunement.
Field Guide draws on lineages of DIY Zine Culture in queer liberation and disability justice movements to create an access point for visitors to engage with the work and reflect on their own experiences of burnout. Using grids and planes as generative architectures.
Field Guide explores the possibilities of painting beyond its traditional materials and methods to examine how normative structures and systems act as both sites of growth and oppression for disabled people. These rigid, linear infrastructures become a space for abundance and exploration: a fertile space, a trellis for those pushed to the wayside to grow and bloom. Flowers, insects, and weather patterns act as metaphors for the cyclical and organic nature of disabled communities and relationships, mirroring the ways we thrive through mutual care systems. These motifs symbolize natural cycles of decay and growth, highlighting the reciprocities and multiplicities of organic systems around us, positioning ecological relationalities as models of care and sustenance for disabled communities.
See the show at 42 Carden from August 1 – 31!
