Gathering Air, a breath of vivid memory into the lungs and soul group exhibition by Katherine Wildman and Henry Kunkel delves into memory and the psyche. Memory is fickle, it deceives us and when we access deep thoughts and memories, we are guests in our own recreations. Both Wildman and Kunkel come back from these lands bearing marks of their journey.

Wildman comes bearing skin. Flesh is her gift, a weighted extension protruding not just through small drawings on paint tester chips but into physical reality as well in equally small sculptures. A small metal totem bearing a face stands vigil underneath Wildman’s Hope, a twisting hanging torso reminiscent of Michelangelo’s iteration of saint Bartholomew in the Sistine Chapel. The totem is something of a lightning rod, the torso a limp suicide.

Where Wildman draws on a bodily violence, Kunkel wades less-than-tenderly yet with a venerable lucidity. Bright colors pierce through Kunkel’s paintings in conjunction with half legible symbols that form a marriage of codes. There’s a strange disjunction in this union however, a delicacy even in the rawest moves. Sensitive gestures in hands and eyes captured in ragged scrapings. Abortive images of lemons, faces, hands mark the paintings as though Lascaux paintings on cave walls. This M.O may not be too far off the mark either, after all, Kunkel’s love affair with paint is in a long heritage of painting as a visual language.

This is the Final Weekend to see Gathering Air

What: Gathering Air, Works by Katherine Wildman and Henry Kunkel
Where: Piano Craft Gallery, 793 Tremont Street, Boston
When: Opening reception Friday July 8, 6-9pm, Open July 8-31
You can view the work of Wildman here and the work of Kunkel here
You can also check out the Piano Craft Gallery’s website here

For Earlier coverage on Gathering Air you can see our previous writeup