TARA GEER: SOWN IN THE HALF LIGHT
July 22 - August 20, 2023
In the John Little Barn
Reception: Saturday, July 22, 5-7pm
Artist Talk: Sunday, August 20, 3pm
Though drawing is traditionally considered the preparation or practice for, say, painting, Geer harnesses the temporality and quickening of a sketch to make large, monochromatic work with stark emotional power. Her drawings have both expertise and moving roughness. In this first public, large-scale installation of her work, strange bulbs, pale stems and wildly scribbled panels hum with possibility and raw, determined life.
Read the full press release below, or Watch the video to learn more about the artist’s process!
On August 20, 2023, artist Tara Geer and facilitator Jasanna Britton worked with 35 audience members to run a Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) program at Duck Creek on the occasion of Tara’s exhibition. Visual Thinking Strategies is an educational non-profit that trains educators in schools, museums, and institutions of higher education to use a student-centered facilitation method to create inclusive discussions. VTS is much more than an art curriculum; as a facilitation method and professional development program that fosters collaborative, inclusive, community-building dialogue, VTS has the power to change the way we relate to one another as teachers, students, and colleagues. VTS is comprised of arts and education professionals that specialize in deep listening and responsive teaching practices.
Video by Peconic Pictures, as part of our Community Outreach Program, made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts.
The Arts Center at Duck Creek is pleased to present Tara Geer: Sown in the Half Light, A drawing installation, opening on Saturday, July 22, and on view through August, 20, 2023. A reception for the artist will be held from 5-7 pm on Saturday, July 22. The artist will lead a Talk and Visual Thinking Strategies discussion with the audience, on 8/20 at 3:00pm.
At her studio in Harlem, Geer’s work table is blackened with charcoal, piled with stubs of pencils, charcoal in chunks, crumbling once-white pastels, bowls of used erasers. Drawing has her primary medium for three decades. Though drawing is traditionally considered the preparation or practice for, say, painting, Geer harnesses the temporality and quickening of a sketch to make large, monochromatic work with stark emotional power. Her drawings have both expertise and moving roughness. In this first public, large-scale installation of her work, strange bulbs, pale stems and wildly scribbled panels hum with possibility and raw, determined life.
After visiting Duck Creek on a bleak day this past winter, Geer started making work specifically for our barn. She has been drawing –and discarding drawings– for this exhibition in alliance with our mission to honor the spirit of John Little and the majesty of the 20th Century barn that houses our main gallery.. To prepare for this endeavor, Geer drove out from the City with carloads of drawings and paper, on the week overcast with smoke from the Canadian fires. She measured, cut, tailored and re-sketched each work with respect for the historic structure of our barn walls. Her work matched the rawness of the space: the tangled lines, and lumpy things seem to grow, not entirely rationally, in the half light.
Geer’s focus, surprisingly, is not so much on what we see, but on what we feel. She mixes acute observational drawing, snagging details from her surroundings, with an imagination driven, at times, by what she calls a “stomach-clenching fury.” “I stand in a darkening studio, in a city filling with smoke and heat, groping for something to say outside of language– not a replica of the place, or the details, or the news, or even an articulate explanation, but to extend the mute feeling of it.” While you see her very skillful draftsmanship, and versatile mark-making, it’s as if she is barrelling past that, to communicate some kind of stark aliveness. She is interested in the kind of seeing we do before we recognize something --not of a world of known, knowable, sure things-- but of forces in the periphery. Things she cannot explain. “The wildernesses I find just off the ground.” She writes. “We are all trying to learn how to live with what we have previously sown in one half light, of not knowing what we are doing, or not being able to see well enough through the haze. We have to learn how to live with the things that have grown tall since we first padded the seeds into soft soil.”
Geer draws, and uses drawing, to uncover the bare bones of making and being. “Not to find the skin of the visible world, but to find what lies, heaving, right beneath it.”
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Tara Geer (b.1970, Boston, MA) makes, teaches, and studies drawing. Her drawings are in the collections of the Morgan Museum, the Parrish Museum and the Harlem Children’s Art Fund. Her work with the 6-woman activist collective, Victory Garden, is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The New York Historical Society, The Beinecke Library at Yale University, and The Canadian Museum. She’s had solo shows in LA and in NY, and exhibited at Guild Gallery, Jason McCoy, Tibor de Nagy, Glenn Horowitz Gallery, The National Arts Club, Steven Harvey, Aran Cravey, Flowers, the Four Seasons and Ace hotels --among others. There are 2 books about her work; Carrying Silence: The Drawings of Tara Geer; and New York Studio Conversations. Articles in Bomb, ArtNet & White Hot magazine. She has been teaching for 3 decades –to children with visual processing challenges, museum educators, blocked artists, doctors at Yale, poets at the Homeschool, and –since 2012– in the Art and Art Education program at Teachers College, Columbia University. She has a BA and MFA from Columbia University where she had a full teaching fellowship and graduated Magna Cum Laude, and Phi Beta Kappa. She has received the Louis Sudler Prize, the Joan Sovern prize, BlogHer Voice of the Year, and residencies at Denniston Hill and The MacDowell Colony. She lives and works in New York City.
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings, and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
Wendell Berry