The Goldmark Cultural Center’s Ruth Andres Gallery presents “F A R E W E L L”, an interactive solo exhibition of cyanotypes and photographic negatives by Goldmark artist A.L. Quillen.
The exhibition is on display from 6/29 through 7/26 with a reception on Saturday 7/25 from 3:00pm to 5:00pm. The reception is a great opportunity to meet the artist and learn from her about her artwork.
About the Exhibition
Nothing feels complete because I am incomplete. Please rifle through retired negatives, cyanotypes, digital pigment prints, transparencies backed in gold, and scraps of material to learn more about the little nothings embedded in everyday trials.
This exhibition, “Farewell”, is a visual conversation between who I am now and who I was during my 2019 show, “Let Go”. That body of work processed unresolved emotion and stifled trauma. It was an outpouring of grief attempting to cure the broken pieces of myself. There were over two hundred mixed media cyanotypes printed, the negatives altered, and printed again. It was displayed in a swarm around a column, and the negatives will never print another cyanotype, making each image limited edition. Those negatives are now backed in gold, transitioning them into an artwork of themselves and solidifying their purpose as a past exploration of craft. Check out the concept of “Kintsugi”.
They say writers break themselves into pieces and call them characters—artists of other mediums do it, too.
This body is the open wound and the closure needed to move on from grief. It’s the process of transforming objects that are meant to be discarded into something worthy of holding attention.
It’s proof that broken things can be beautiful and travels through an idea in its entirety. It’s the struggle to find purpose. And it’s the accumulation of thought and experimentation in process, theory, and practice. I don’t practice art, because I “need” to. I practice art, because the process of creating something grants me the time and space to understand myself at basic emotional levels. Visual pieces like this and writing are my voice.
About the Artist
A.L. Quillen is a photographer in Dallas who utilizes historical processes to make accessible fine art. Her work is about grief over time, the elusivity of memory, and the power of mental processing. She’s opening a darkroom and alt lab to keep these practices alive and writes fantasy novels in her spare time.