An Odyssey | Everything We Need Is Always With Us
Cheselyn Amato
February 5th – February 28th, 2016
Cheselyn Amato’s first solo show at AXIS Gallery, Uncontrollable Beauty, is an interdisciplinary circumstance designed as a context for the experience of enchantment, wonderment, awe, and delight in the face of ever-present uncertainty. This is a walk in a forest of visual poetical episodes celebrating the power of positive thinking and feeling, and an invitation to active commitment to discerning and reaching for each our own fullest human potential. Uncontrollable Beauty is a heart song, a representation of the odyssey of living every day. Cheselyn’s installation proposes that everything we need is always with us, and a part of our lives is always dedicated as a journey to recognize, know, receive, accept, and pursue our possibilities and opportunities, and how things go, all at once.
The Gallery space is transformed into a forest of unexpected passages…swooning, swaggering, billowing, twisting, spiraling, and flowing – both ecstatic and marking the somber too –with cascading fabric yardages of every which pattern and color scheme as well as articulations and punctuations of circular, oval, square, rectangular and hexagonal framed images, canvases, embroidery hoops, and mirrors organized like flocks of birds moving in the sky, like patches of grasses in the marsh, a garden made of all that glitters, the way to the treasure and the treasure itself, one and the same always. Central to the experience – key to all truth, beauty, goodness, and courage – is the Great Heart by which thought, feeling and action can find best balance. And by our great heart, by listening to our hearts, we are each able to build mountains and climb them as we make them, until we reach our summits, the places that glitter and gleam – these are the grand mountains that are in fact ourselves. Our constructed selves – made by our labor and effort and toil – are represented by a mountain of words and stuff – paper pages and packaging material – collected over the course of a life lived every day. Surrounding the heart and the mountain that is our body, the viewer will encounter details – arrangements, groups, stands, patches and areas, a garden of delights and surprises, that, in encouraging the acts of noticing and paying attention, lingering and listening, invites the view to encounter and fully engage the self and the wild, mysterious reality of being.