DORMANT: SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2021
DORMANT new works by Terra Goolsby and Jim Edwards & curated by Kelcey Edwards among 100+ exhibitions selected for SPRING/BREAK Art Show NYC 2021 September 8-13. The works in the exhibition will remain available online through December.
CURATORIAL STATEMENT
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DORMANT is a two-person exhibition, featuring work by Austin-based LatinX artist Terra Goolsby and 79-year-old retired Texas curator Jim Edwards.
Growing up in Monterrey, California, Jim Edwards would spend hours watching the small, mysterious creatures in the tide pools. When his career as a curator of contemporary art curator brought him to Texas, he found himself similarly fascinated by the shapes he found in the hill country and deserts of the American South and Southwest.
At first glance, these two artists couldn't be more different. Terra’s work is feminist, sublime and sexy. She paints with nail polish and sculpts with fur. But they have a similar fascination with the shapes things take in nature: the spiraled shell of a snail, the eye of a bird, the wispy line of feathers, the curved lines of woodgrain and bone. Their work questions everything. Why the cactus flower? What is the personality of animals? What does the skull have to say to the seedling? What is inside the vessel and why? It is the stuff of hieroglyphs, of death and decay and the forest floor.
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I have known Terra for 20 years, and she has always been an avid reader. In college, she was partial to psychology books on early childhood development. This makes sense to me now, artistically, in her understanding of birth and growth, of nascency, of girlhood into womanhood. Her images have the sexual boldness of an orchid. These are images inspired by the shapeshifting Nahual, and there is no mistaking what they are up to—these are images of life itself. Jim Edwards is my father. He has always been partial to poetry. The crystallization, the rhythm, and the magic.
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Time passed and we all got older. My parents moved to San Francisco, where they met originally. Terra and I, living in different states, each had twins, within a year of each other. This summer, after the long winter of COVID, I returned to California to finally see my parents, who I have missed terribly and who now, in their 70s, are experiencing health problems none of us were prepared for. I find myself thinking about these cycles of life, across time. Of acts of creation and times of decay. Of the importance of staying connected to nature and the deep wellspring of human history and mythology. To learn from the ancient. The native. The feral. The naturalist. The mystic. To see and think and feel and say and do, and get it out there before it is lost to time, eaten by animals and returned to the earth, like we all will be, soon enough.
- Kelcey Edwards