The new exhibition at the Community Center Art Gallery brings together the work of three distinguished Maryland artists: painters Jessica Damen and Pamela Phillips and sculptor and printmaker Judith Kornett. Entitled Oh, Heart, Here Is Your Healing, the show reflects on the longing for healing and our mixed successes in achieving it. The show recognizes creative work itself as a healing process and foregrounds the interest of all three artists in the re-integration of humanity with the natural world.
Jessica Damen
Damen is represented in the exhibition by a series of tall, narrow “sliver” paintings. Around 1′ wide and approaching 7′ tall, several of the pieces function like core samples, revealing the intermingling of different layers of matter and realms of experience. Each work is a response to a poem or a poet’s remembrance which viewers can read and hear at Damen’s Visions Voices Verses website linked at greenbeltmd.gov/arts. The exhibition title derives from one such source text: Meadow Turf by Janet Lewis. This poem inspired Damen’s painting Lacing Life and Death, depicting a boy in a flowery meadow, “his legs laced into its underground growth” nourished by the remains of seasons past. Damen’s Leaping into Eel’s Death Colors, a meditation on the death of a dear friend and collaborator, similarly juxtaposes a vibrant surface world with a watery underworld, full of agency and adventure in its own right. The painting No Memorials for This Lot, created in 2018, bears an uncanny resonance in our present moment; sunflowers – the national flower of Ukraine – are equated with fallen soldiers. As penned by Tim Joyce in the source poem for this piece, “how recently they were golden-faced and young.”
Damen’s works are lavishly painted, from the cheek of a human figure to the flesh of a strawberry dropped on the kitchen floor. Her canvases are full of light, life and color, notwithstanding their darker allusions. Damen’s work seems to be
fueled by the sort of cognitive and emotional dissonance that has become so pervasive in recent times, as we witness blossoms unfolding cheerfully in the midst of a pandemic, birds singing in a world at war. In the artist’s words, the paintings “strive to mend universal wounds through beauty,” healing both by suturing and by soothing.
Judith Kornett
The exhibition includes a selection of ceramic sculptures and monoprints by Kornett, a former Greenbelt resident and Greenbelt Recreation arts instructor. Kornett’s sculptures share with Damen’s paintings an earthy sensibility. Sometimes that earthiness is more than metaphorical; some works that might otherwise have been included in the show were placed by the artist in her garden, to be unmade by the elements and returned to the soil. The pieces which we are lucky enough to see include Equi (meaning “equal”), which juxtaposes a wide-eyed human figure with a horse’s skull; Kornett is an experienced equestrian specializing in dressage. We also see a self-portrait head and the heavily encrusted bust entitled Barnacle Baby. Her piece Open Heart combines a seated figure with an open chest merging both with her chair and with an accretion of aquatic forms. Kornett’s figures often incorporate ambiguous organic elements that can be read either as growths or as poultices. In her work as in life, it can be difficult to distinguish ailment from remedy.
As an undergraduate and graduate student, Kornett had focused on printmaking. Recently, she has returned to the modality through an exploration of new techniques and safer materials. Kornett builds up dream-like imagery with grated pigments before pulling her monoprints and adding linear elements with permanent markers. The resulting surfaces are quite painterly, much like the surfaces of her sculptures. The texture evokes stone, while the visionary images and discontinuous marks resolve in the viewer’s eye like galaxies. Kornett’s prints incorporate human faces and “archetypes” such as skulls and ravens that are recurring symbols in her work.
Pamela Phillips
Phillips strives to maintain some distance between her therapeutic and creative practices, the subject of healing more generally is sometimes referenced in her imagery and materials. She writes: “Shaman #2, The Depth of Blue, and Calling the Spirits recall my experiences of meeting shamans and healers in my travels in Peru, Venezuela and New Mexico where the indigenous people often include aspects of nature and spirituality into their ceremonies and healing practices.” The Depth of Blue incorporates milagros – charms used both in supplication and in thanks for divine healing. Two figures extend their hands toward one another amidst a field of star-like mirrors, one figure emerging only partially from the void. The piece is one of several works by Phillips with a cosmic aspect, conveyed both through celestial imagery and in the form of feathers and winged creatures.
A Place Beyond Dawn, Phillips shares, “depicts the aftermath of being a caregiver and putting aside my art for a loved one for nearly a year. Sanctuary City evokes a way of healing in a broader sense through the caring and protection of our immigrant communities.” Phillips draws additional inspiration from poetry and other literature, citing Rumi and Mary Oliver among her influences. Sometimes, distorted handwriting is incorporated into Phillips’s paintings as a visual element, as in the piece Reckoning. Here, a human figure with small moth-like wings appears to ponder the secrets of the universe, her hands resting on a large, mysterious text.
Together, the three artists offer a depiction of the human condition that is both unvarnished and lofty, inviting us to enjoy their work with our feet on the ground and our heads among the stars. Oh, Heart, Here is Your Healing: Jessica Damen, Judith Kornett, and Pamela Phillips will be on view daily from April 3 through May 20. Gallery hours are: Mondays through Fridays, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Saturdays, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.; and Sundays, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. All ages are welcome. Meet the artists at a reception on Sunday, May 1, 1 to 3 p.m., in conjunction with a studio Open House. Visit greenbeltmd.gov/arts for links to online information about these artists and about additional Greenbelt Recreation ARTS programs, which are sponsored in part by the Maryland State Arts Council.