Passages

Haley Josephs

April 8 - May 7, 2022

At the forest's rim silence meets

A dark beast;

Quietly, on the hill, dies the evening wind,

The plaint of the blackbird ceases,

And the gentle flutes of autumn

Fall silent in the reed.

On a black cloud you sail,

Drunk on poppies,

The nocturnal pool,

The starry sky.

The lunar voice of the sister sounds unceasing

Through the spiriting night

Spiritual Twilight

Georg Trakl

~~~~

Jack Barrett is pleased to announce the opening of Haley Josephs’ third solo show with the gallery. Passages, open April 8th 2022, exhibits both traditional paintings and those with sculptural attachments.

In this exhibition, American artist Haley Josephs has continued to develop her elemental imagery into spiritual realms. Her subjects, human and non-human, are now set on moving forward through acts of growth and decay, like the nurse log, or the fallen tree that decays but sustains its elemental neighbors. In their decay, grief is substituted for bounty, and for beauty. The characters of the forest and the natural milieu in Josephs’ works are shifting, engaging in the transformation of death and rebirth, childhood, and womanhood.

Formally, the works incorporate this transit through bridging abstraction and figuration. This approach is meant to draw attention to those creative and mysterious moments of transition between the physical world and what lies beyond. The pathways in mountainous landscapes, bordering the sky with its spaciousness and room for day dreaming, are the artist's own spiritual space, where the symbolic and the angelic co-exist.

Rather than dark memento mori, there is a warmth that drives Josephs’ oeuvre, with saturated palettes that emphasize an encounter with both the earthly and the spiritual. In classical memento mori, the inevitability of death is made palpable, but in Josephs’ works, an intervention is exercised, querying the finality of exiting the material realm. In contrast, beauty and wonder abound through the imagined eyes of childhood. Josephs maintains that children embody a unique sincerity in their relationships to perception. Through their eyes, we may bear witness to their truth in simple and literal translations.

Behind this work is an intention to honor the renewal of life on earth, and in equal measure, to honor the importance of surrendering to what lies ahead. The proposed narrative in Passages is not linear, but cyclical.

-Kristen Cochrane