Claire Colette: Shoot Forth Thunder

Night Gallery is pleased to announce Claire Colette’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, Shoot Forth Thunder, a presentation of works on canvas and paper.

Furthering Colette’s distinct painterly grammar, the paintings uncover the potency within elemental forces, merging organic and inorganic materials toward each painting’s own agency. Beginning with a ritualistic slow build of the surface using a repeated vernacular of gridded lines, acrylic, ash, salt, resin, and dried flowers applied with non-traditional tools perhaps more akin to building—air brushes, rulers, masking tape—the materials activate the works as symbiotic, resolute bodies; alchemical conduits for material and supernatural energies.

Colette’s systemic approach underpins the inherent structure of the paintings which yield personal and ideological landscapes. Their human-scaled verticality and muted palettes orient us in between familiar existential dichotomies: sky and earth, day and night, birth and death. Raised molding paste trails emerge from grids of airy blues and Los Angeles-dusk soft pinks, creating a mysterious and tangible topography that could be tree roots, buoy lines, umbilical cords, or desire paths—connective tissue mapping the visual plane. Colette’s repeated language of half moons and crosses appear as constellation-like directional guides, lifeboats for the journey. The works on paper function like crumbs on a path or notes in margins; highly viscous layers of paint are built up and carved out to reveal the elemental forces that comprise matter.

Perhaps the only subject in the history of painting immune from the display of hierarchies or a politics, unpopulated landscapes rarely portray the trappings of human constructions—one can’t own the sky. Instead, they function as liminal spaces outside of linear time where moments of deeper knowing are possible: to rest, to grieve, to commune with natural forces, to calibrate a next move. In this pastoral reverie, thunderous insights have the space to strike.

Shoot Forth Thunder references Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part II, in which the speaker yearns for the power embedded in thunder to enact justice in earthly matters. Metaphorically and mythologically, thunder is the catalyst for transformation and the deliverer of karma from which a subject’s path is irrevocably altered.

Within each of Colette’s paintings a visual disruption to the soothing symmetry appears: flashes of earthy, opaque micaceous iron oxide hover above and below, at times in thin gashes, at others spilling out in overwhelming chasms. These visual and metaphorical thunderbolts dislodge the stable system of the painting, pushing the viewer to make a navigational and philosophical decision. At the precipice of these voids we can choose to proceed through passageways where we face unknown futures. Much like the journey of grief, these portals also remind us of the infinite potential in beginnings: for new systems, for justice, for utopia. A centerpiece of the show pulls its title from the following:

I was sent from the power

And have come to those who contemplate me

And am found among those who seek me

….For I am the first and the last…

The Thunder/Perfect Mind

Nag Hammadi Scriptures

 -Megan Reed