The Middle of Nowhere is a retrospective of sorts, including work created in a span of over twelve years and drawn from many places I have lived and traveled. This collection of pieces is centered on the conversation between the human urge to understand and contain- to measure, capture and logically break down- and the infinite complexity of the world around us, which is outside our grasp, unquantifiable, and beyond us: the infinite mystery, the other. I vividly experience this interaction in the act of painting as I try to take in the universe outside of me through all the tools of my understanding and map them onto the canvas surface. The works acknowledge this interplay with fluctuations between fully realized illusions of depth and compositions that flatten, contained in squares.
This conversation has many aspects and is expressed in many forms: in man-made constructions with immense simplified shapes, clean forms loaded with our calculations and intentions but showing their real existence in the natural world through cracks, rust or a unique play of light; in ever-changing clouds, collected and contained in a grid; in immense empty landscapes that seem anonymous and nowhere, but are revealed as completely unique instances created by infinitely complex and specific circumstances. This interaction between our mental framework and the infinite and real is at the heart of human consciousness, and I find it immensely rewarding and tremendously reassuring to be inevitably humbled and defied in my attempts to “grasp”; it means that I am not a “detached eye” and that I exist not alone in a self-created projection of my creation. Other always surprises and mystifies; creation is a conversation with infinite mystery.
Examining our state of being in this way also invites questioning and a need to examine the mental tools we choose in our experience of existence- what is our reality when we flatten the world onto a grid, when we logically break apart and understand only through measurements and numbers, when we mark the richness of our days on calendar squares? What do we go blind to in the universe around us when we only comprehend what fits in the framework of understanding? What do we lose through homogenizing our thinking and our environment, in endangering the incredible diversity of ways of knowing shaped by time and place throughout human existence? While I paint with an intended meaning and my own experience of this work, I also hope that these pieces are rewarding purely as beautiful images that invite your own unique interaction.
Thank you for coming to see and take in, adding your thoughts and experiences to the meaning of these creations and further transforming them- and continuing the conversation beyond.
-Ann Froeschle
Creations by Ann Froeschle 