Every day is Earth Day.

Or should be. As Earth Week draws to a close, a show at the Bareiss Gallery, organized by Paul O’Connor (as if he’s not busy enough making his own extraordinary art), opens this weekend.

For these three artists, two from Santa Fe and one from Abiquiu (Bonnie Lynch, Debra Salopek, and Linda Lynch), the compass points of sky and land are preoccupations in a world of lost bearings.

If there is much to differentiate global humanity, we have at least in common the quotidian experience of the rising and setting of the sun.  Yet it is taken for granted and we forget the sun keeping our bearings.  From the malaise of fragmented attention, unaware of what even birds know, we forget the role of the sky in keeping us true north. So reads the Press Release sent out earlier this month by O’Connor.

Debra Salopek’s drawings and paintings invite the viewer into a stillness usually found only in Nature; restrained in her use of colour,  they are “cantos to the horizon line, as much for the internal horizon as for one in the line of sight.”

In stark contrast to Salopek’s luminescent landscapes, the  earth wrought and soil burned clay vessels made by Bonnie Lynch, bring us back home to the high desert; a place of red earth, rusty dust and the play of light on eroded stone. Lynch envisions the negative space within a vessel as much as that encompassing it.

“Ancient memory is in the landscape” states Linda Lynch (she and Bonnie Lynch are sisters.) “Drawing becomes my vehicle for pursuing remote memory.”  

Her imagination journeys through the annals of history’s mists, from the prow of a Bronze Age boat to the history of salt, her use of saturated pigment in gesture and line takes us with her,  back to the dawn of knowledge as well as “to the precipice of our predicament in a global landscape now so vulnerable.”

These artists express in their work a primordial understanding of sky and land we each carry, but one we do not necessarily engage in the instant digital age. So reads their combined statement for this show.

And in this exhibition, their work stands as a reminder of what we all inherently know; the Earth is our Mother. Sacred and deserving of reverence.

Notes On The Landscape Works by Bonnie Lynch, Debra Salopek, Linda Lynch opens at the Bareiss Gallery tomorrow, April 27th and runs through May 26, 2019.

The Bareiss Gallery is located at 15 NM Route 150 (Ski Valley Road) in Taos.

For more information please call: 505-614-4342

All photographs by Paul O’Connor

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