We were come to see the dawn
5 July, 2024 - 5 August 2024 | The Narthex Gallery | 6400 S Kimbark | Chicago, IL, USA
Yifan Li | @moondtraum
Kate Hefferan | @kmacks
Eleanor Witt Wardlaw | @skipscratch
Tier 1
Shoulderfold, 2024
EWW
EWW
Morn, 2024
YL
YL
The Dove of Love Fell Off the Perch, 2024
KH
KH
Tier 2
Mourning Locket, 2023
KH
KH
Proves it, 2024
EWW
EWW
Woodwind, 202
YL
YL
Tier 3
Little Ones on the Rise, 2024
KH
KH
Trawling, 2024
EWW
EWW
Helen, 2024
YL
YL
It’s said that, with regards to the way of things outside our control, that when a door closes, a window opens.
Does a window keep us from coming into direct line, and direct contact with what is without, the warden of what remains within? A membrane both permeable and impermeable. An open window lets in the breeze, perhaps pestilence or releases the warmth. What of a window stained?
The Eclipse has been much on the mind and tongue for us.
We concluded that what allowed view of that certain lunar transgression upon us, before the Sun (through specialized glasses, pinholes, through the canopy of a tree or an old caulunder) was not filtration but rather, obscuration. Obscuration here protects our vision.
Annie Dillard writes of her experience with total eclipse “Seeing this black body was like seeing a mushroom cloud. The heart screeched. The meaning of the sight overwhelmed its fascination. It obliterated meaning itself. If you were to glance out one day and see a row of mushroom clouds rising on the horizon, you would know at once that what you were seeing, remarkable as it was, was intrinsically not worth remarking. No use running to tell anyone. Significant as it was, it did not matter a whit. For what is significance? It is significance for people. No people, no significance. This is all I have to tell you.
In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warmed us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil. Its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned.
The world which lay under darkness and stillness following the closing of the lid was not the world we know. The event was over. Its devastation lay around about us. The clamoring mind and heart stilled, almost indifferent, certainly disembodied, frail, and exhausted. The hills were hushed, obliterated. Up in the sky, like a crater from some distant cataclysm, was a hollow ring.”
At an anarchist action in Carbondale Illinois, at the geographic center of the total eclipse on the night of its arrival, a crowd could be heard chanting “The end of the world, beginning of the next.”
A dear friend of mine wrote of a jarring dream they had woken from recently. In this dream they were back home. Bombs were dropping in the distance and an air of “I told you so” wafted towards their parents. They said were not scared, afraid. That this new reality in their homeland shone to their parents, finally, the reality experienced by so many others in their own respective home lands.
Dillard additionally wrote on the eclipse “When it was our generation’s turn to be alive. I could not hear him; the wind was too loud. Behind him the sun was going. We had all started down a chute of time. At first it was pleasant; now there was no stopping it.“
Yesterday was July 4th, profound. A celebration, foretelling and a remembrance, as it began so it shall end, as we see through our window, in our home. Rockets red glare, bombs bursting in air.
In Nefertiti for the Blind, Dana DeGiulio writes
“The ground against which any figure is thrown determines its visibility but not whether or not it's there.
A man flees openly across the proscenium and is dead before he gets there. The witness videotaping the action does not interrupt the scene; he explained later, "I wanted him to know I was there for him." A tree bisects the frame. stubbornly vertical.
A boy races towards the vanishing point and is dead before he gets there and this is the philosophical question of painting: is it small or it is far?
At worst, we already know, we don't care we can't learn we aren't anything we took your face we couldn't refuse and are dry, dry, a pre-recorded thunderstorm off-stage on a loop the end of which is signaled by a barking dog.”
Virginia Woolf's diary in reflection of her journey to see a total eclipse states “We were come to see the dawn. Trains like ours were starting all over England at the very moment to see the dawn. All noses were pointing north…There was no sleep, no fixity in England that night. All were on the roads; all were traveling north. All were thinking of the dawn.”
Li, Witt Wardlaw, and Hefferan are Chicago based painters, hailing from Beijing, Portland OR and Boulder CO. This exhibition was curated by Zolt Brown-Dunn