June 08 – September 07, 2024

Opening reception: Saturday, June 8, 6–8pm

Lora Reynolds is pleased to announce FLOWER SOUND, an exhibition of drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, video, and light by eight artists: Laddie John Dill, the Haas Brothers, Simon Haas, Karl Haendel, Donald Moffett, Meghann Riepenhoff, Jim Torok, and Bing Wright.

     What we actually find is beyond predicting: a rabbit, suddenly yearning to be elsewhere;
     a woodcock, fluttering his disclaimer; a cock pheasant, indignant over wetting his
     feathers in the grass.

     Once in a while we turn up a coon or mink, returning late from the night’s foray.
     Sometimes we rout a heron from his unfinished fishing, or surprise a mother wood duck
     with her convoy of ducklings, headed full-steam for the shelter of the pickerelweeds.
     Sometimes we see deer sauntering back to the thickets, replete with alfalfa blooms,
     veronica, and wild lettuce. More often we see only the interweaving darkened lines
     that lazy hoofs have traced on the silken fabric of the dew.

     I can feel the sun now. The bird-chorus has run out of breath. The far clank of cowbells
     bespeaks a herd ambling to pasture. A tractor roars warning that my neighbor is astir.
     The world has shrunk to those mean dimensions known to county clerks. We turn toward
     home, and breakfast.

     —Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There

LADDIE JOHN DILL
Laddie John Dill’s Light Sentences—equal parts drawing, painting, and sculpture—are thin, straight, glass tubes that hang on the wall and glow with segments of colored light. The sections range between two inches and two feet long—each with its own color and intensity—and come to a combined length of about seven feet in a single work. As Ken Johnson wrote for the New York Times, “they glow beautifully like strings of illuminated glass beads.”

HAAS BROTHERS
The Haas Brothers’ cartoon drawings—of cuddly, bug-eyed animals (occasionally brandishing oversized humanoid genitalia)—are the connective tissue between all their sculptures, furniture, and paintings. Whether a full-sized tree made of Venetian glass beads, a street lamp resembling a pendulous Venus fly trap, a furry chair with ebony horns and bronze feet, a blown-glass snail with a marble shell, a ceramic vessel that looks like an underwater coral with wiggly tentacles, or a brass stool with knock-kneed legs—each pristine object the Haas Brothers make is a goofy character from a bizarre, technicolor, mathematically precise, alien ecosystem. Theirs is a utopian world of sexual freedom, shamelessness, exploration, gender/class/racial equality, and FUN.

SIMON HAAS
Simon Haas’s drawings pay tribute to his queered forefathers and the persecution they endured, offer a tender counter-narrative to the heteronormative view of cruising culture, and are a deeply personal reflection on the internalized homophobia many gay men—including Haas himself—struggle to overcome in their own journeys toward self-acceptance.

KARL HAENDEL
Karl Haendel’s drawings play with a wide range of imagery: medieval suits of armor, big cats and dead bees, human hands, oversized scribbles, introspective and vulnerable texts, embodied punctuation, portraits of famous politicians, barrel racers, all manner of cartoons, aerial views of flooded neighborhoods, the rotunda at the Texas State Capitol. Haendel’s drawings look inward, to probe at his most intimate fears and insecurities, as well as outward, toward the many contradictions that frame our cultural/political/historical realities. All the while, he is asking himself: How do I put more good into the world than bad? Give more than I take? Feel my feelings fully? Take responsibility for my failures? Minimize my carbon footprint? Haendel’s project is a reconsideration of American masculinity—an exchange of outdated and destructive stereotypes for a more nuanced alternative: an empathetic, feminist, inclusive, anti-macho, occasionally cheeky, invariably sincere framework for living a life.

DONALD MOFFETT
The surfaces of Donald Moffett’s paintings are luscious, seductive, and almost always monochromatic. But the enchanting textures he conjures—with dense/extruded/fatty/rich/uncut oil paint or glossy pigmented resin or glistening rabbit-skin glue—belie the personal and political depths that drive Moffett’s ambitions. Campaigns for justice form the core of the work, charted by Moffett’s close examinations of pleasure and heartbreak—whether in the news, on the street, in the bedroom, or in nature.

MEGHANN RIEPENHOFF
Meghann Riepenhoff makes her images with an antiquated photographic printing process—no camera, no lens—and thinks of her work as a collaboration with the ocean, the landscape, rain, snow, and sun. Her dynamic cyanotypes take on varying shades of blue and give the impression of water in motion—droplets that run before amassing into sheets; waves that swell, crash, and spray fine mist; snowdrifts that grow in icy storms. Much of Riepenhoff’s work is large enough to feel immersive, overwhelming—her biggest pieces can even recall the apocalyptic surf at Nazaré.

JIM TOROK
Before starting a rigorous day’s work on his miniature oil portraits, Jim Torok makes a handful of loose drawings in a style he began to develop as a youth. He tries to let himself draw whatever is on his mind, no matter how ridiculous, to warm up his hand and mind (similar to how many people rely on coffee in the mornings). The drawings can be block-letter slogans (tender or aspirational, sarcastic or obscene), monologues by bald stick figures with oversized noses (self-deprecating self-portraits), or any sort of inventive and absurd doodle. In colored pencil, felt-tipped marker, and occasionally paint on panel, Torok’s expressive cartoons chart the inner workings of his mind with invigorating directness.

BING WRIGHT
Windows have been a recurring motif in Bing Wright’s work since the late 1980s. He has made photographic prints and light boxes that appear to be double-hung windows, framing the pastoral vistas from his farmhouse in the Catskills. Now, with his first foray into sculpture and moving images, Wright’s newest trompe-l’œil window is a more elaborate facsimile than ever before.

A PDF of the full exhibition can be seen HERE.