SPRING IS LIKE A PERHAPS HAND

Online Exclusive Exhibition
May 16 – July 1, 2022 

Jason McCoy Gallery is pleased to present Spring is Like a Perhaps Hand, a virtual exhibition featuring a diverse group of works by four artists: Mary Flinn, Dori Latman, Laurie Heller Marcus, and Andra Samelson. The theme of the exhibition is inspired by E. E. Cummings’s poem of the same title, which reads as follows:

Influenced by her many years as a landscape painter, Mary Flinn also draws from her vast experience of studying Mysore-style painting in India and calligraphy in Japan. Lately, her paintings have been a meditation on softening the touch, loosening ideas and letting the fluidity of the medium become a vehicle. It is her ambition to explore how form can remain open, translucent and porous, just as “the way Spring make an appearance in our lives.”

During the pandemic, Dori Latman used the ritual of daily artmaking as a tool to cope with disorienting feelings of grief and loss. It was a means to chart her presence in the moment and to build a bridge between her internal and external worlds, allowing her to move through feelings instead of getting stuck inside them.” My practice is a form of catharsis, transforming painful feelings into something more transitory. For me, grief and loss is not something I can carry alone. Sharing with others, finding ways to contextualize a private practice, is part of the work.”

Fusing words with images that are derived from her small-scale paintings and works on paper, Laurie Heller Marcus creates stirring visuals that belong to a category all their own. Neither documentary nor narrative, her works translate as personal everyday contemplations that occasionally touch on classical mythology. She states: “Tailoring outsized stories onto small panels or canvases, I paint to locate myself in this piercing and mutable world and share my perception with others. Signs, symbols, ancient and iconic art, performances, advertisements, all are free to evolve beyond familiar associations. 

Andra Samelson is a multimedia artist whose work is inspired by the relationship of microcosm and macrocosm, the celestial and terrestrial. She notes: “My artwork pays homage to the great mystery of the sky and the way microcosm and macrocosm mirror each other. I use imagery often associated with atomic and galactic systems. I often work with the circle, a symbol of infinity, perfect and endless, referencing both metaphysical concepts and circular forms in nature from the structure within a cell to the display of the starry universe. My work explores the space between things, in gaps and openings that articulate a vibrant openness as I orchestrate the compositions of my paintings to activate this empty space.” 

SELECTED WORKS: