Wainscott, NY – Tripoli Gallery is pleased to present our 19th Annual Thanksgiving Collective. This year, the exhibition takes a cue from a quote that the late artist Ashley Bickerton stated in a conversation for The Surfer’s Journal in 2022. The artist, who passed the same year from ALS was highly aware of his own mortality and generously shared about his musings on death. Artists who have been selected for this ambitious exhibition, conceptually honor the passing from one realm to another whether spiritual, emotional, physical, or psychological. The Thanksgiving Collective is an honored tradition that kicks off the holiday seasons including the transition from one calendar year to the next.
The world is so unpredictable. Things happen suddenly, unexpectedly. We want to feel we are in control of our own existence. In some ways we are, in some ways we’re not. We are ruled by the forces of chance and coincidence. ~ Paul Auster, writer & director
Gallery founder Tripoli Patterson met Bickerton as a teenager and said, “In this year’s 19th Annual Thanksgiving Collective, we look inward as we search for the purpose to embark on another day, another year, another lifetime. We learn that the pace in which we exist does not ultimately change the duration of that existence. We reflect on the artists and great thinkers of the past while engaging with them in the present”
It is in this way that artists have been brought into the Thanksgiving Collective, a space of gratitude and reflection most needed in a time when so many are experiencing heartbreak and lack. Artists include Katherine Bernhardt, Mark Cora-Mooroom Bungaree, Otis Hope Carey, Sue Carlson, Sally Egbert, Sabra Moon Elliot, Connie Fox, Félix Bonilla Gerena, Mary Heilmann, Judith Hudson, Bryan Hunt, Lee Jaffe, Yung Jake, Benjamin Keating, Laith McGregor, Angelbert Metoyer, Miles Partington, Esther Ruiz, Lauren West, Jerry Wilkerson, and Lucy Winton. The exhibition seeks to filter and flutter between realities, an aesthetic dance, a visual poem, and a eulogy for the living.
Perhaps Impact (1971) by Lee Jaffe speaks the most clearly to the uncertainty of time. In the documentation of his performance with Vito Acconci, a montage of black and white photographs stretch over ten feet, capturing the two artists as they ran towards each other with the intention of impact. Theirs is a conceptual, psychological action mirroring societal frustration along with the perception of impact, touching bodies, the inward shown outward. Parallels, painters Sally Egbert, Katherine Bernhardt, Sue Carlson, Connie Fox, and sculptor Mark Cora-Mooroom Bungaree, commune in spaces unseen, spiritual, and undefinable. All of the work can be metaphorically entered and exited, through unknown possibilities, futures, and celestial spaces.
——————————–
Image: Sally Egbert, Orange Flower, 2021, oil and hand painted fabric on canvas, 12 x 16 inches (30.48 x 40.64 cm)
Credit: Courtesy Tripoli Gallery and The Artist, © Sally Egbert 2023
