ARTISTS:
Kate Bae, Olivia Baldwin, Eve Biddle, Liza Bingham, Ramon F Bofill, Emily Clare, Edwige Charlot, Katie Commodore, Dawn Edmondson, Wendy Edwards, Rachel Frank, Cadence Giersbach, Jodie Mim Goodnough, Grace Hager, Barry Hazard, Eric Hibit, Jennifer Hilton, Jee Hwang, Mary Kocol, Katie Lane, Amanda Lechner, Tess Michalik, Georgia Mischak, Nadia Haji Omar, Annalisa Oswald, Amy Jean Porter, Alicia Renadette, Cristi Rinklin, Peter Roux, Jennifer Shepard, Toby Sisson, Tiffany Smith, Jeremy Stenger, Amy Talluto, Mara Trachtenberg, Chris Ulivo, Emma Welty, Brett Day Windham, and Kelly Worman. 

THICKET curator’s statement
Thickets are dense areas of plants, found both inside woodlands and in grassy plains.  A thicket is something that provides cover for smaller species and tends to be hard to penetrate for larger species. Bursting with greens, browns, and yellows, it is a space of filtered light, a liminal space, an edge space. Thickets can be unruly and teeming with life, but also protective - refusing entry to predators. 

Many artists are drawn to middle spaces, collective in-betweens to gather. Thicket here is a middle space, not a clearing or a dense cover. This group of artists reflects an impulse toward greenery and lushness tempered by scale. Many works show a density but with a welcome uncertainty.  

There is a sense that the thicket is both compellingly lush and dangerous and also small and weedy.  Some works showcase the threatening precarity of edge spaces, others detail the invasive species that constitute a great many thicket-spaces.  

Each artist chosen for this investigation reveals a corner of the brush, from bright greenery to scrubby brown and orange dead leaves below. There is a clean well-lit space rendered in textile and a squishy lush dark space in oil.  Some works present abstractions of the idea of thicket, from the energy of the twittering birds to the strangeness of the combination of life growing at the edges of farmland and human civilization. I invite you into each artist's world, many of them jewel box depictions of space outdoors.  Most importantly, this is a gathering space.  

Thicket is an investigation of the liminal, haunted, green, and unruly edge spaces.

–Kirstin Lamb, curator

A thicket of summer grass / Is all that remains / Of the dreams of ancient warriors.
–Basho

Beyond, outside of me, in the green and gold thicket, among the tremulous branches, sings the unknown. It calls to me.  But the unknown is familiar and therefore we do know, with a knowledge of memory, where the poetic voice comes from and where it goes.  I was here before.
–Octavio Paz, The Bow and the Lyre

Thicket
: a dense growth of shrubbery or small trees : COPSE
: something resembling a thicket in density or impenetrability : TANGLE
–Merriam Webster Dictionary