Published
as “Six Creative! Human! Dynamic! Solutions!” in Knox Book Beat, The Berkeley Times, 21 September, 2023.
The
catalog to the magnificent art show, Archana
Horsting, On the Fringe of the Field, A Survey of Works 1972 – 2022,
produced by Berkeley’s Kala Art Institute, was another striking gift. As Kala co-founder
with Yuzo Nakano, leading and contributing with classes, fellowship and
residency programs as well as her own art; Horsting has been as monumental and
dynamic in the East Bay art scene as her labyrinths, etchings, drawings and
linear and smudged “oil stick on paper” “which feels to me like the soil or the
earth itself.”
The
three articles, a fine interview and her Artist’s Statement all expand the history,
origins, breadth, ”beauty and mystery” “pointing toward meaning” of her already
“bold” “personal visual vocabulary.” “Problems of metaphor, symbolism and
artistic communication” was the theme of her undergraduate program at Santa
Cruz, and Berin Golonu notes how “her choice of title (
Padovan Arches) after the work’s creation speaks to the way in
which our minds are wired to make associations when our minds are confronted
with the strange or unrecognizable.”
Thus, I
understood, as well as could admire,
abstraction, as never before. “Associations are drawn from the
scope of our life experiences.” Again – childlike or childhood trust and
release to sensation and emotion
create and/or
echo the heretofore undiscovered,
hidden or ancestrally, biologically innate “meaning.”
Marvelous!
See also https://www.kala.org/gallery/exhibitions/
