A Breath Before | Alto Gallery | December 7, 2018 - January 12, 2019
A Breath Before
A Breath Before combines the works of Lindsay Smith Gustave and Kaitlyn Tucek. The first two-person exhibition between Gustave and Tucek, A Breath Before raises questions of instinct, patience, and motherhood. This exhibition brings together each artists’ independent reaction to their experience as mothers, one equally stoic and dynamic, the other delicate and composed, but both vulnerable in their contemplation of the space that exists between the body and that from which it grows.
Tucek follows instinct and records the invisible momentum of a body in space. An exercise in subtlety, she records the exquisite pain and pleasure of motherhood, understanding the ebb-and-flow between both. Painted representations of a monolithic entity withstands outside forces and protects, while still understanding the limits of control. An object, suspended in time, taking a breath in contemplation of the pace and multitudes of life. Serving as a pillar or monument to life, overlooking the circumstances gained by the course of events and the resultant multitudes of an individual identity.
For Gustave, this body of work explores genetic inheritance, vulnerability, and emotional response. These vessels contain human moments: processing familial pathology and the generational self. Objects are held within specific spaces but grow to fill them. Imagined as delicate beaded petals, leaves, and bowing fronds preserved in custom hand blown glass shells, meticulous construction and abstraction of experience coalesce. The space between object and container provides a moment to focus on the interstices connecting physical action and memory. These works lay bare expectations and psychoses, embrace the transparency to invite shared experience, and although intentionally contained, still flourish.
A Breath Before offers a pause for inhalation, the anticipation before the gentle nudge into entropy when the breath leaves the body and becomes something else of its own.