ELEVATED
OCTOBER 13 -DECEMBER 14, 2018
VERY presents Elevated, a group exhibition bringing together works by Candice Smith Corby, Sheila Gallagher, Isabel Riley and Douglas Weathersby. Through a combination of painting and sculpture, the artists reflect on the process of art making as a personal ritual and way to access spirituality through everyday practices. Found and scrap materials used throughout the works become poetic meditations that imbue the mundane with new meaning. On a formal level, a strong verticality gives many of the works a totemic quality. In her painting “Sum Total”, Candice Smith Corby portrays a precarious stack of household and natural objects that symbolizes the quiet chaos of her day to day thoughts. In “Offering”, Sheila Gallagher builds a tower of gold-leafed concrete blocks as an altar which she covers with votives made by friends and family. Isabel Riley constructs raw, visceral sculptures that take inspiration from monumental architecture and incorporate detritus she finds in her daily life. And Douglas Weathersby creates sculptures by repeatedly and ritualistically dipping wooden paint stirrers into white paint left over from home improvement projects. After the paint dips accumulate over time, Weathersby inverts the sticks, the result being triumphant sword or club shapes. Together, the works in Elevated do not merely repurpose objects but rather uplift them to become records and odes to our everyday existence.