Still: Lissa Hunter, Jane Sauer, Jo Stealey and Carol Stein
108 Contemporary
through September 20
The double meaning in this show’s title—“still” as in “even now, after all this time” and “still” as in “quiet, at rest”—is a graceful entry point into this gathering of mixed media works by four women who’ve known each other for decades. Stillness, they suggest, is not stasis or escape; instead it’s a space of attention in which the movements of life reveal themselves.
As seasoned artists and longtime friends based in Maine and Missouri, Lissa Hunter, Jane Sauer, Jo Stealey, and Carol Stein met virtually during Covid for regular conversations about art and life. This group show came out of those talks and continues their ongoing dialogue around subjects both personal and political. What does it mean to still be here, to still be creating? To know the world as still violent yet still precious, still what it’s always been yet still changeable? To hold onto relationships through the shifting tides of a life?
Their curiosity about these questions takes form here in skillful, surprising fine craft pieces with a subtle but strong emotional edge, curated by the artists and laid out in the space with sensitive imagination by 108 Contemporary’s Jolie Hossack. This isn’t an exhibit packed with eye-popping colors or audacious strokes, but it’s not cautious, either. It makes me appreciate the way this gallery presents work from different generations of artists throughout a given year; it’s satisfying to see the results of decades of practice, just as it is to see the efforts of artists newer to the field. In this “craft” discipline, both experimentation and dedication seem to be throughlines, no matter how long an artist has been in the game.
A painting of a window—“Still Life,” by Lissa Hunter—is the first thing you see as you walk into this show, its four panes framing a moody field and forest, with a pale blue sky overhead, painted over black with stormy brushstrokes. The window’s frame extends into a little sill at the bottom, lined with small, carefully rendered objects: a bird’s nest, a comb, a basket, a stack of letters. The viewer is “inside,” standing at the window with the artist, looking ahead into a wild distance even as she’s present with landmarks of her own life’s journey.
That play at a threshold—interior/exterior, the known/the uncertain, the fragile/the enduring, the pause/the action—extends throughout the show. Several pieces by Carol Stein (who’s a psychotherapist as well as an artist) called “No Clear Path” and two titled “Moving Toward Stillness” hang near each other: a journey can be both a peaceful, exploratory meander and the unmarked trail of confusion, even trauma. With care, Stein lays heavy ink over rice paper and slips strips of color together in these works, an effect of coherence within fragmentation.