UNDERSTORY, an artist-run gallery championing new and emerging voices, is dedicated to driving discourse with Darkness, opening July 15. Darkness probes the moist inner workings of the places we are often most unwilling to go: our bodies, our racial identities, and even the ground under our feet. The works in this exhibition challenge the sterility, generational shame, and white supremacy of puritanical American culture while also celebrating mystery, fecundity, imperfection, and uncertainty.

Who’s afraid of the dark? Are you willing to look at the things our culture tells us should be hidden or concealed? Are you willing to get down and dirty? In contemporary Western thought, darkness has been equated with racial inferiority, concealment, ignorance, and the sinister. But what is it really?

Jackie Carpenter’s work offers a peek into the human body as host of non-human living organisms; a literal and metaphorical garden in a dark space. In her quilting, Marian Lyndgaard considers prairie restoration and gardening as paths towards mending and repairing the damage caused by industrial agriculture. The mending happens underground in the dark space of entangled roots through communications that seem incomprehensible to us. Renée Jett’s work explores both racial identity and physical darkness. She challenges the narratives of domination that have taught us that physical and emotional blackness is evil and should be feared.

Tristan Kovacs’s paintings expose domestic interiors and nightscapes with large swaths of darkness. Are we willing to look into that space? Cassie Jeffries considers the connections between people and the natural world in abstract paintings on hand-shaped wooden panels. Her work explores interior dark spaces as sites of hidden emergence. Bonnie O App’s cyanotypes promote regenerative agriculture and invite a closer look at the plants whose roots need the darkness of soil to flourish.

What’s at stake when we talk about the things our culture tells us should be concealed? Can we confront our own shame? We must be in deep relation to ourselves, each other, and the earth if we are going to experience wholeness. Working across quilting, mending, collage, cyanotype, and painting, these artists explore the revelatory nature of darkness and its connections to rejuvenation, growth, and an awakening of our senses. Roots, bodies, identities, the walls of a cave, the dark pane of a window at night. They form or reveal themselves in the dark. What might we find if we’re willing to stay there?

UNDERSTORY is dedicated to exhibiting interdisciplinary and conceptual work by regional and emerging artists, and to fostering experimental practice, critical dialogue, and community engagement.

Join us for the opening reception of Darkness from 5 to 8 pm on Wednesday, July 15 at UNDERSTORY, located on the RAMP (lower level) at 78th Street Studios in Cleveland.

UNDERSTORY
AT 78TH STREET STUDIOS
1305 West 80th Street, Suite 019
Cleveland, Ohio 44102
understory.art

EVENTS:

Darkness: a group exhibition celebrating darkness as a site of revelation and repair, July 15–August 22. Opening reception, 5-8pm Wednesday, July 15