Gallery Conversations – Solace / Sublime

Above: Megan Frances, Subtropical Tangle III, 2020.

Gallery Conversations, AGCC’s onsite artist talk series, will feature the curator, Molly Enholm Velazco, and several artists of Solace/Sublime in a live conversation and Q&A in the gallery on Saturday, August 19th, at 3pm. 

Solace/Sublime is a group exhibition featuring the work of artists who look to the phenomenon of the natural world as a primary source of inspiration. Historically, portrayals of the natural world were often cast as attempts to conjure the aesthetics of the sublime. Accordingly, paintings of land, sea and sky would emphasize the grandeur of nature and its epic scale and power to conjure emotions of awe, and even terror, within the viewer. In this exhibition, the works of contemporary Southern Californian artists Samantha Fields, Megan Frances, Yvette Gellis, Virginia Katz, R. Nelson Parrish and Molly Enholm Velazco, seek to explore a contrasting notion through the very elements often associated with the sublime experience. To conjure a view of an endless horizon, towering mountains, or the unfettered power of raw nature to offer moments of hope and solace, as opposed to existential dread. Through exploring these elemental forces of nature, these artists embrace the dichotomies of the natural world: the minute and overwhelming, the eternal and the ephemeral, the solace and the sublime.   

This exhibition is supported by the Pasadena Art Alliance. Funding is also provided by the California Natural Resources Agency for the Museum Grant Program under the California Cultural and Historical Endowment. Additional support for the AGCC exhibitions program is provided by City of Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks, the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture, The Ahmanson Foundation, Norris Foundation, the Ralph M. Parsons Foundation, and Perenchio Foundation.