mood X
In the tenth installment in our new series called, a mood, we invited Gala Bent. Gala Bent is an artist and illustrator who lives and works in Seattle with her husband Zack, who is also an artist, and three sons, who may be doomed to become artists as well. She teaches at Cornish College of the Arts and is represented by G.Gibson Projects. Soon, she will be releasing an online exhibition At the Edge of the Sky.
To see more of Gala’s work please visit her website.
“Since being asked to create a mood… our country has continued to struggle to unwrap the shapes of its current pandemics—viral and social—in ways I have never seen before. The mood has shifted, and continues to shift. I present here images or pieces of art that have jumped out at me during this time. Some have direct connections to my own studio practice, which is concerned right now with the mysteries of the cosmos (black holes, death, nbd), like the NASA gif which shows us a dust storm on Mars, with beautifully weird shreds of missing pieces, like a torn fabric of information. Others jumped out on a personal visceral level—the power of Theaster Gates’ image is likely connected to anxieties around schooling, as a parent and teacher, but also in some of the horror of what we have been taught, while Lorna Simpson’s collage invites a buoyant but delicate hope. The playlist does the same thing. Its centerpiece is the cosmos itself, reflected through the scale of the human stage.”
Image credits mood board (top to bottom, left to right): (1) Lorna Simpson, Earth & Sky #30, 2016., From Lorna Simpson Collages, Chronicle Books 2018, source. Also, I accidentally found one of the Public Domain sources Simpson used; (2) Claire Curneen, Portent, 80cm h x 22cm w x 15cm d 2012. photo: Dewi Tannatt Lloyd, source; (3) Cecilia Vicuña, source; (4) Michael Stamm, Tincture #1, 2017. Oil, acrylic, and flashe on linen, 40 x 30 inches, source; (5) Public Domain vintage image of intestines; (6) Theaster Gates, Work Chair, wood, brush and tar, 32 x 18 x 22 in., Executed in 2013; (7) NASA Mars Dust Storm, source; (8) Darren Waterston, Our Passage, 2018., Oil on wood panel, 24 x 24 in.
