Installation view: Justine Rivas, How to Carry a Cloud. Photo courtesy of The Valley Justine Rivas: How to Carry a Cloud Up through August 7, 2021 The Valley 1800 Camino del La Placita, Unit D Taos, NM 87571 From the Press Release: The Valley is pleased to present its first solo exhibition with Los Angeles-based painter Justine Rivas . The exhibition, titled How to carry a cloud, includes a series of new paintings that explore hidden sources of water in the desert landscape. Rivas uses clouds and creosote bushes as metaphors for the interconnected sources of life-giving moisture in arid regions. Both reflect water stored in the land and the air, deceptively close and yet inaccessible. Cloud forms appear across several works, oscillating between pattern and landscape. As above, so below- creosote in its various forms appear as a familiar and familial plant speaking to the artists’ connection to the desert landscape, her family has lived in the borderlands since t...
Jon Cowan, I Saw the End, 2021, oil and acrylic on canvas, 12 x 10 in. For my first post in quite a while, I wanted to present a photo essay of a recent show in Santa Fe. High Desert High! at Smoke the Moon features work by 22 artists from LA to London and many places in between and is billed as "A summer salon of important paintings celebrating the Dez." In much of the work presented here, there is a strange sense of spare tranquility punctuated by an underlying sense of expectation ( Aryo Toh Djojo , and Will Bruno to name two) . While Rat Face , a painter from the U.K. uses an economical palette to depict deftly rendered scenes of futile desperation and dark humor. There is a conceptual complexity in her piece, Head in the Sand as well as in the always sublime work of Jon Cowan . Both present us with a glimmer of a somber uncertainty (or certainty) that sets their painting apart from much of the vibrant, humorously cool and laid-back work in th...