...Color and smell and sound. And the sound gets so deep and bass and vibrant that it becomes solid and you can touch it. That radiance and complexity are right here—they’re never somewhere else.

(Alan Watts, Just so, 2020)

Selenas Mountain is pleased to present The highest level of listening at Gure Gallery in Chicago, IL. The curation touches on hearing your inner self in the studio as an artist with the quickness and slowness in Art practice—how creative pace is navigated in time. The exhibition speaks without sound to how our lives are based on mistakes, accidents, and unpredictable occurrences.

Spanning figurative and abstract work, the pieces on view explore the contemporary thought process from Chicago and New York based artists. The speed for an artist is an individual experience and brings decisive moments of a completed piece to be viewed. A wide gamut in the studio production time and output movement varies from each artist.

I call these subject matters ‘ideational triggers’ and they can take the form of objects, memories, dreams, perceptions, feelings or sensations all at some point bearing down on language (spoken, heard, read or otherwise). Bearing down on these triggers is a way for the artist to learn the navigational routes of and through the peculiar territory of the senses.

(Dominique Nahas, Relations matter, VCU Essay, 2008)

The clowns who dance before our eyes in art today, in a disharmonious chorus line, recklessly and hopelessly out of step, out of time, and out of patience with each other, are divergent offspring of the same embryo.

(Carlos McCormick, Clowns, Artforum)