Etherton Gallery presents a new exhibition, Again with the Real, opening February 7th with a reception on Saturday, February 11th from 7pm to 10pm. Again with the Real addresses how material objects come to symbolize personal experiences, aspirations, and identity in a selection of recent paintings, drawings, and mixed media by Chris Rush, and collage, paintings, and mixed media by Ellen McMahon. Chris Rush is an award winning artist, designer and author of The Light Years: A Memoir (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2019). Ellen McMahon is the Associate Dean of Research at the University of Arizona School of Art. Her artistic practice embraces a number of concerns including the intersections of memory and place. She is exhibiting four series, What is Lost, 2022, What is Seen, 2022, What Remains, 2022, and Lost Language, 2009. Rush and McMahon will attend the reception, and DJ Carl Hanni will spin tunes.
Both Chris Rush and Ellen McMahon create art objects that act as a bridge between a past that they seek to preserve and understand and the desire to create a more optimistic future. McMahon imbues her work both metaphorically and figuratively with the people, places, and experiences of her past while Rush seeks understanding and redemption through portraiture.
Chris Rush’s figurative and metaphorical portraits function as a conduit between a difficult but humorous past, and a hopeful future. For example, in Double, 2022, the doubled charcoal sketch of an imaginary woman’s face hovers over an 18th century French document, in which each modification is dated and recorded, stretching over 100 years. Rush’s portraits of children, like Anna and Madda, which depicts a child clinging to their mother, and self-portraits that look back at an imagined younger self, like Self-Portrait, Mexico, 2006-2023, construct an idyllic childhood and release him from the madness of his youth. Since the discipline of going to his studio every morning probably saved him, Again with the Real also contains mixed media work that emphasizes creation and erasure, like Paisley, 2023, a portrait of the back of a person’s head, made on a 19th century slate board, used by school children to practice letters and solve math problems with chalk. Rush also makes metaphorical portraits, like Blue Nude, 2022. Blue Nude is a stand-in for the artist, a still-life painting of a blue towel, casually dropped along the edge of a pool, oddly rakish, worn, and graceful. It is an homage to the 18th century painter, Jean Siméon Chardin (1699-1779), known for his still-lifes and scenes from everyday life.
Ellen McMahon’s painting, What is Lost V, 2022, from the series What is Lost, was inspired by an epic road trip to Nevada and Eastern Oregon in 2014, whose purpose was to revisit her past and understand the path her life had taken, from a young field biologist in 1970 to her identity as an established artist in 2023. McMahon returned to the remote Pacific Northwest, where she had camped and captured bats, shrews, and frogs for the Forest Service. She discovered that while the awe-inspiring scale of the landscape moved her as much as it had in her youth, the girl she had been remained unknowable. As McMahon wrote, “…[F]rom somewhere between my romantic memories of the past and my dread of an eco-apocalyptic future, these landscapes emerged from the interactions [among] ink, paint, charcoal and paper. All the work produced from the series What is Lost, What is Seen, and What Remains, including What is Lost V, 2022, represents the “marks and patterns of the places that have formed us… an intersection of memory and place.”
McMahon’s collages from the series Lost Language of a Desert Sea originated in a four month stay in a small studio at the Gulf of California, near Puerto Peñasco (Rocky Point), México in 2009. Without cellphone or internet, she embraced the opportunity to study stingrays, tiny fish, and shore birds, imagining a kind of reciprocal acknowledgment of the other’s presence. Her easy communion with the shore-life provided a refuge from her difficulties communicating in Spanish, which had raised the spectre of childhood dyslexia. As her intimacy and familiarity with the animals and birds grew, she began to see their shapes in marbled paper. Motivated by her experience in Puerto Peñasco and the shame and confusion that “letter-forms” caused in her childhood, McMahon created a new visually dynamic language, whose text read like a message without a code, but which “capture[d] [her] experience of the place, the people, the animals, and the sea.”
Etherton Gallery’s new exhibition, Again with the Real reminds us that simple experiences like camping or going to the beach are worthy of commemoration, and that even the most mundane objects like a towel or a brick, can carry significant personal meaning.
For more information about Again with the Real, Chris Rush or Ellen McMahon, contact Etherton Gallery, (520) 624-7370 or info@ethertongallery.com.
