My Pet Ram is pleased to present Curtains featuring Vinna Begin, Lachlan Hinwood, and Claire Whitehurst.

In our digital reality, where everything is sharp and crisp and ready at a moment’s notice, time spent pondering the greater realm of existence can seem stodgy, slow, or old-fashioned. But step into the wilderness, and one cannot help but begin to detach from the bustle of modern life. Pulling back the veil, we glimpse the expanses of natural history and marvel at the relative blip of human existence. Curtains presents new works by a trio of artists that attempt to translate a transcendental reverie on time and place into visual tableaus rife with prescient energy. Vinna Begin, Claire Whitehurst, and Lachlan Hinwood share a predilection for quiet rumination and internal growth. Their works present amalgams of painterly care and spent time through which the viewer can access the fleeting world outside our daily lives. Acting almost as visual maps of the unseen, the pieces included in the exhibition traverse the divide between mystic insignia and painterly abstraction.

Vinna Begin’s oil on panel compositions burst from their frame as amorphous, organic shapes twisting and folding within. Embracing a sharp delineation of form between masses of hazy color, each work almost appears to be a collage of translucent paper. Small trails of flitting shapes in panels like Oro meander through the larger arrangement like a trail through some vast wilderness. Indeed, the reference to natural shapes and phenomena makes a visual connection to the floral paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe, but Begin’s insistence on purely abstract structures melds the recognizable with something less tangible. “Portraits of lucid experience, rendered as soft, hazy marriages of organic form, mirror her interest in the universal, contemplative and transcendental,” her statement notes. Giving shape to daily feelings, Begin crafts a visual record of lived experience.

In meticulously layered studies in acrylic, Claire Whitehurst constructs hypnotic panels that draw reference to nature while also alluding to mystic symbolism. Growing up queer in the American South, she frequently invented spaces for escape, combining a need for personal contemplation with a poetic exploration of the natural world. Though permeated with references to the body and its place within the landscape, pieces like two clouds meet skirt around immediate representation in favor of shifting optical strata that transfix the viewer’s gaze. Concentric rainbows figure prominently in her oeuvre, their multicolored lines creating palpable visual density that remind one of the rings in a tree or delicate paintings in sand. Modulations in the paint carry over to the waving edges of the support, further enhancing the animated, pulsating subjects as they project into the viewer’s space.

Stemming from meditative walks in the forest or observational sketches made from his studio window, Lachlan Hinwood’s intimate paintings serve as a catalyst for a conversation about our relationship to the landscape. The curvilinear markings and subtle gradations of color bring to mind the pseudo-religious paintings of Swedish artist Hilma af Klint, but pieces like Moon Reflection and Early Morning Visitor have their roots in landscape, no matter how overrun the scene becomes with patchwork fields and calligraphic strokes. In fractured views, Hinwood combines representational vistas with explosive layers of shape and color. A waning moon or a moth in flight become one with the environment through the artist’s fastidious application of paint. Place and time fuse into a more enthralling whole.

Curtains will be on view Friday, December 9 through Sunday, January 8, 2023. A reception will be held on Friday, December 9 from 6-9pm. The gallery is located at 48 Hester Street in the Lower East Side. Gallery hours are Wednesday-Sunday from 12-7pm.