Holding Space: Dreams and Memories
"This is the time for every artist in every genre to do what he or she does loudly and consistently. It doesn't matter to me what your position is. You've got to keep asserting the complexity and the originality of life, and the multiplicity of it, and the facets of it...This is no time for anything else than the best that you've got."
-Toni Morrison
Ella West Gallery presents Holding Space: Dreams and Memories, an exhibition featuring the work of Isabel Lu (she/they), Julia Rivera (she/her), and Toni Scott (she/her). Three artists whose paintings investigate and reimagine what it means to embody the experiences of migration, intergenerational tradition, institutional exclusion, and gender variance, their works initiate a wider conversation around the concept of space, who is allowed to occupy it, and how.
First penned by psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, the enduring quote “between stimulus and response, there is space,” acts as an entreatment to examine the relationship between internal and external worlds. Holding space, a practice of personal and communal liberation, encourages filling Frankl’s conceptual “space” with compassionate presence for and unconditional acceptance of an individual’s struggles from self-reflexive and relational perspectives. Through the concept of holding space, the audience is invited to examine both internal struggles and those encountered at the site of institutional structures.
Within their work, each one of the artists creates a container to hold space not only for themselves, but for an audience whose experiences may be either reflected or challenged by the stories contained on canvas.
