[a partial list of falling]: NATHLIE PROVOSTY

Before a group of twenty-five people I recited text from an unwritten paper; my paper, but one “written” through channeling. The words flowed out of my mouth, bypassing my mind. I remember only the first sentence: “I shoot an arrow through the palm of intention.” I saw as I spoke one arrow going through many palms, as though the palms were rings… but the image only existed in language and the language as metaphor. 

The above dream, observed in July 2019, encapsulates a relationship to abstraction with which I’m involved: intention is the palm and the arrow shooting through; the palm is a hand and a ring; the scenario is incident, image, language, and metaphor; the theme is aim—action—without control. The dream is a dense container in which each thing is multiple things at once. 

In painting terms, the above dream vessel provides an entrance into the question of form: can a single form be a covert, compact rocket of allusions? Can form portray an imaginative, non-didactic site of experience?

Falling and rising is commonly encountered in art history as well as human life: think Raphael’s Transfiguration, Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void (which wryly captures both falling and flight), or falling asleep every night. The exhibition attempts to build upon this history / banality with paintings that splinter, soar, intertwine and constrict, and drawings that dab, scratch and spill open pictorial space. 

It is accompanied by a 112 page artist’s book, [a partial list of falling], which reproduces drawings from 2020-2022, together with writing / dreams / photographs, quotes from various books, emails, art historical paintings, and a poem by the writer Charity Coleman. The narrative tells the story of transformation, with a special emphasis on the avant-garde filmmaker and friend Jonas Mekas, and the recurring appearance of a dragon.