Recalling the Chimaera:
Candace Jensen, Thomas Little and Coleman Stevenson

Exhibition Review Live Now!

'Language and Its Legacies: Recalling the Chimaera at Amos Eno Gallery by Matilda Lin Berke

Amos Eno Gallery is pleased to present Recalling the Chimaera, works on paper, parchment, pellicles and the paper-like, by artists Candace Jensen (VT), Thomas Little (NC) and Coleman Stevenson (OR). The exhibition has been covered in The Adroit Journal Exhibition Review, Language and Its Legacies.

Please join us for a closing reception on Sunday, June 5th from 4-6 pm - no RSVP required.

Recalling the Chimæra includes griffonage, symbiotic organismic collaborations, abecedary illuminations, bestiaries and visual spellwork by three artists whose interdisciplinary practices defy simple categorization, and deify the rhizomatic, the mycelial, the alchemical, and the holographic. The assemblage of works on view summon the traditions of sigildry, spellwork, erasure, calligraphic illumination, guerrilla gardening, biology, psychology, recursive systems, yantras, poetry, labyrinths, embroidery, mediumship, folk magic, and many other pursuits that bridge the above with the below, contain all, and bind nothing.

At its simplest, Recalling the Chimaera pursues the aesthetics of complex, polysemic messages, and seeks to present language as a magical question. This exhibition is a ritual, a spell, and likely also a collection of asemic ephemera. The work is nothing more than earth and fibers, slime mold and hammered sheets of metal which allow light to pass through, like stained glass. The artists are devotees to the yellow friend, haphazard sorcerers and cautious Doctors Frankenstein, making a pass at presenting meaning inherent in their material, playfully irreverent of some conventions and deadly serious about the rest of them.

Candace Jensen (she/her) is a polymath artist, radical idealist and woods witch living on the unceded lands of the Elnu Abenaki and Pennacook people (Southern Vermont). Jensen earned an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and a BFA from Tyler School of Art, both in Philadelphia (traditional lands of the Lenni-Lenape). She has exhibited her work in New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Vermont and Antwerp, Belgium, and is currently represented by Amos Eno Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. Her visual art and writing have appeared in Iterant, Ante Mag, Studio Visit Magazine, the Komask biannual catalog, and is forthcoming in both ?·r?/ti? modern poetry as well as Cambridge Writers’ Workshop’s Disobedient Futures. Jensen serves as the Book Arts & Letterpress Director at the Ruth Stone House, Art Editor of Iterant Magazine, faculty at Fleisher Art Memorial, and is Cofounder and Programming Director of In Situ Polyculture Commons, an arts residency and regenerative culture catalyst.

www.candacejensen.com @artist.cjensen on IG

Thomas is an ink and pigment maker who explores mystic and scientific concepts through the lens of ink and our relationship to mark making. He gathers threads from alchemical imagery, chemical phenomena, mystic observations and incorporates them into a holistic synthesis theory of art-science-magic. The natural world informs his work with ink in not only the materials used, but the relationships expressed between organism and element. He makes the pigments he uses and sells from firearms he takes out of circulation and dissolves in acid. He works with slime mold (Physarum polycephalum) to produce cross species collaborative artifacts. He has contributed pigments to university material libraries, including the University of Massachusetts and the University of Pennsylvania. He has curated exhibits on pigment histories and taught numerous workshops in museums, art studios and botanicas.

@a.rural.pen on IG

Coleman Stevenson is the author of three collections of poems, Light Sleeper (2020), Breakfast (2015), and The Accidental Rarefication of Pattern #5609 (2012), several books about the Tarot including The Dark Exact Tarot Guide, and a book of essays on creativity accompanying the card game Metaphysik. Her writing has appeared in a variety of publications such as Seattle Review, Mid-American Review, Louisiana Literature, tarot.com, and the anthology Motionless from the Iron Bridge. In addition to her work as a designer of tarot and oracle decks through her company The Dark Exact. Her fine art work, exhibited in galleries around the Pacific Northwest, focuses on the intersections between image and text. She has been a guest curator for various gallery spaces in the Portland, Oregon, area, and has taught poetry, tarot, design theory, and cultural studies at a number of different institutions there, most currently for the Literary Arts Delve series, which includes seminars at the Portland Art Museum.

https://www.colemanstevenson.com/ @darkexact on IG