“Fresh Paint,” the Parrish Art Museum’s rotating series of single-artwork exhibitions presented in collaboration with the FLAG Art Foundation, opens Thursday with “Reseeding Chaco,” a mixed-media diptych by Emmi Whitehorse that is being shown for the first time.
Whitehorse, an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation who lives and works in Santa Fe, has said her paintings “tell the story of knowing land over time — of being completely, microcosmically within a place.”
Her abstract works reflect her experience of the vastness of northern New Mexico, translating the high-desert landscape into a distinctive approach to color and line, says the museum. “Clouds of pigment intermingle with layers of hand-drawn symbols and abstract markings,” whose effect is “like deciphering forms through the depths of water or the haze of dust kicked up on a dirt road.”
“My visual symbology is ambiguous and created to be at once illuminating and obscure,” the artist says. “Much like my memory, which comes back in bits and pieces.” Her paintings reflect the Navajo worldview of Hózhó, which she describes as “a harmonious balance of beauty, nature, humanity, and the whole universe.”
Deliberately meditative and slow, the works register fleeting sensory perceptions and subtle shifts in light, space, and color — the central axes around which her paintings have evolved, according to the Garth Greenan Gallery in Chelsea, which represents her.
“What we do to the land comes back to us,” says the artist. “The calm and beauty that is in my work, I hope serves as a reminder of what is underfoot, of the exchange we make with nature.”
By circumventing traditional exhibition-planning timelines, “Fresh Paint” enables artists to showcase newly created artworks and ideas. The series, installed in the museum’s Creativity Lounge, is open to the public at no charge during regular museum hours.
“Fresh Paint: Emmi Whitehorse” was organized by Scout Hutchinson, the FLAG Art Foundation’s associate curator of contemporary art. It will continue through Sept. 28.
