Flourish : Judy Pfaff, Ross Bleckner, Jamie Brunson, Katy
Stone, Jae Ko, Kathy Moss, Ana Maria Hernando, Terry Maker,
Trine Bumiller, Rebecca DiDominico, Brad Miller

Robischon Gallery presents "Flourish," a group exhibition presenting new and recent work by eleven recognized and celebrated artists including MacArthur Genius Grant recipient Judy Pfaff, famed New York artist Ross Bleckner, notable West Coast artists Jamie Brunson of San Francisco and Seattle's Katy Stone, Washington, D.C. sculptor Jae Ko, and New York painter Kathy Moss along with highly-regarded Colorado favorites, Trine Bumiller, Terry Maker, Brad Miller, Ana Maria Hernando and Rebecca DiDomenico.

Nature-based abstraction is prominently featured in this exhibition of paintings, prints and sculpture as each artist uncovers elements and unearths forms revealing a glimpse into Nature's full spectrum. Leafy and dormant branches, shifting light, silhouetted floral forms and aspects of sea and shore all allude to and expand upon the concept of thriving and growth itself. "Flourish" directs the viewer to both the fragile and robust aspects of Nature's cycles illuminating the expansive interconnectedness.

Enkindled by witnessing shapes in motion in Nature, the new and recent prints from the estimable Judy Pfaff and Ross Bleckner both coax organic forms and layers of shifting, deep and delicate color into invocations of fertile ground. Jamie Brunson's saturated and flowing striped paintings from her "Veil" series serve as visual metaphors for a kind of translucent interdependency between life forms. Katy Stone configures light-as-air twists and snips of painted Duralar into shadowy flower cut-outs; creating intricate installations extolling fecund exuberance. In elaborate wall assemblages, Brad Miller's biomorphic ceramic sculptures deftly imitate weighty fossilized forms and evoke a sense of the fantastic with their rock-meets-plant life presence. Inspired by the wind-swept, ancient bristlecone pines in the White Mountains of California, Jae Ko's wall relief sculptures curve and droop; evincing the sense of the frozen motion of the pines translated to shadow-casting abstraction. Trine Bumiller continues to distill the underlying essence of natural, abstracted elements with her latest series of multi-canvas panels evoking stone-rippled wakes, thickets of dogwood twigs and the shifting of starlight across the night sky.

Highly inventive artist Terry Maker provides a sense of the cellular by creating assemblages of fragile, spiny creatures composed of bisected seashells and resin discs. Exposed in cross sections of thinly-sliced panels of white or bright color, Maker joins the topic of primordial life from the sea to the essential supporting skeletal column of vertebrates. Ana Maria Hernando speaks poetically to Nature through incorporating symbols of the female-as-life- force in her sculptural fusions of found antique doilies and circular resin-cast floral embroideries. Rebecca DiDomenico's stitched prints invite investigation with their complex and eccentric sense of nature. Organic forms emerge and thrive out of deep space with symbolic thread as their anchor. And finally, Kathy Moss's intimately focused views of isolated clusters of luscious painted berries offer a spare, yet richly abundant botanical metaphor.

Utilizing a wide variety of media, the exhibition's eleven notable artists address the natural world in remarkably different ways. Apart from the confines of floral motifs, "Flourish" offers another view into the realm of nature-based abstraction with an emphasis on what lies beneath and beyond.