Solo Exhibition - ‘The Nature Cure’ - Vancouver
My new show ‘The Nature Cure’ is opening on Saturday, March 9th, 2024 from 2-4pm at Bau-Xi Gallery in Vancouver. I will be there and look forward to discussing my work and visiting.
The Nature Cure is a timely reminder of our inherent connection to nature and its potential role in maintaining our mental well-being in turbulent times. The show consists of 31 new works.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
As the world becomes an ever-more confusing web of artificial entities and falsehoods, we each struggle to find objective truths and authentic experiences. To me there is nothing more real than the simple act of immersing oneself in nature. It is something consistent that we can hang onto for sanity in this world consumed by ‘alternate facts’ and seemingly endless confrontation.
In this new body of work, I have explored my own reactions to this ‘nature time’. It seems to heal me of stress while time stands still; and there is more beauty to take in than time to absorb it. This grounding in the natural world collides with my angst for the state of our human-centric world. These paintings are the physical and artistic manifestation of that collision.
Anne Griffiths, 2024
THE NATURE CURE - Oil On Linen - 54” x 54” - 2024
ARTIST KYLE SCHEURMANN’S REACTION TO THE NEW SHOW
(COURTESY BAU-XI GALLERY)
Fellow Bau-Xi artist Kyle Scheurmann looks at the extraordinary abstracted landscapes in BC-based artist Anne Griffiths' new solo exhibition The Nature Cure through his ever-thoughtful and clear-sighted lens. Anne Griffiths The Nature Cure opens at Bau-Xi Vancouver's main level on Saturday March 9 and runs through March 23, 2024.
“Lush and overgrown, Anne Griffiths’ paintings are the forest. Freshly harvested from temperate groves on Vancouver Island, her newest work cultivates the last remaining strands of what we remember as ‘nature,’ transforming landscape into thick, tranquil, terrestrial paintings; more earth than oil.
I look at Anne’s paintings as though we’re walking through the understory together. Tangled, velvet vines and moonglade in every direction. Dewed branches dangling overhead. Cerulean shimmers bursting through the canopy. These are paintings to see in person, just as much objects as they are images. Each one a teleportation device to a dense woodland far from the gallery walls.
Because Anne drapes paint on linen like moss drapes on a nurse-log. Whether dragged by an oil stick across the tooth or pressed deep into the fibre by a soaked and worn brush, these are marks made by somebody who’s learned to harness the healing power of the forest. Constantly in the moment of becoming, the paint is growth and decay at the same time. The land in Anne’s paintings is forever suspended in a moment of regeneration, continually resolving itself for the viewer. In an age of artificial stimulation and anecdotal authenticity, we could all benefit from a holistic medicinal harvest. Something perennial and tilled. Something unplugged and embodied. Something we all inherently know the value of but no longer know how to empower.
Saturated in an ailing ecosystem, it’s easy to lose track of our own wellbeing. Which makes this exhibition so crucial…
Fertile and flourishing, somber and sublime - Anne’s paintings are the antidote.”
Kyle Scheurmann, 2024
Bau-Xi Gallery Vancouver
3045 Granville Street
Vancouver, BC. V6H 3J9
1-604-733-7011
