NEW YORK, NY.- Priska C. Juschka Fine Art presents suchness, Amy Rathbone’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. With this exhibition, Rathbone continues to explore her process of investigation, revealing the fragile equilibria between the real and the imaginary.
By applying, at first sight, two disparaging methodologies — one inspired by the measured breathing technique based upon the practices of the Anapanasati Sutta (‘breath mindfulness discourse’), the other tapping into spontaneous sources of the subconscious — Rathbone pursues “antidotes to a dualistic view.”
Rathbone’s delicate drawings, both spontaneously drawn as well as carefully crafted on the surface of the gallery walls, mix with other materials and installations to evoke the viewer’s curiosity by forcing two seemingly polar perspectives to synthesize “when their momentum switches and the boundary of one blurs with the other.” Using combined materials such as young conifer tree trunks pulled down by cast cement weights, Rathbone creates an amalgam of the expected and the unexpected, of the subtle and deliberate associated with the impulsive and coincidental.
With a mélange of natural and artificial materials including wood and cinderblocks, chalk snap lines and spray paint, Rathbone puts her audience in a state of alertness, as her wall drawings and installations feed on the imaginary of the subconscious and on all gradual perceptive states in between.
Through reflective qualities, multiple groupings, tiny kinetics and weighty physical forms, Rathbone prompts the viewer “to examine our ways of seeing and identifying, and to reconsider what we think and know” — ultimately, raising questions of perception and how the human mind works.
Amy Rathbone was born in Cleveland, OH and lives and works in San Francisco, CA. She holds a BFA from Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, OH, and is currently working toward her MFA at the University of California, Berkeley, CA. Rathbone’s work has been the subject of many solo and group exhibitions in San Francisco, CA; Chicago, IL; Philadelphia, PA; New York, NY; Prague, Czech Republic; Wiesbaden, Germany; and Tokyo, Japan. She has also participated in several university shows including: Vital Signs at Tulane University, New Orleans, LA; Running Around the Pool at the Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts, Tallahassee, FL; and Periphery at the Oregon College of Art and Craft, Portland, OR.
