Talley Dunn Gallery

Ori Gersht’s Amalgamation series draws inspiration from a 17th-century still-life painting by Dutch artist Hendrik Schoock. Invited to create a contemporary response, Gersht recreated the alcove from Schoock’s composition, using it as a stage for his own floral arrangements. These works explore the tension between tradition and technology. Gersht photographs his bouquets at the precise moment of explosion—each image captured at 1/60,000th of a second using high-speed photography. This split-second event, invisible to the naked eye, echoes Walter Benjamin’s concept of the “optical unconscious,” revealing what lies beyond ordinary perception.

Talley Dunn Gallery is honored to present the opening of Time is Very Quick, a solo exhibition of lush paintings by esteemed artist Eva Lundsager. Time is Very Quick marks Lundsager’s first presentation of large-scale paintings on canvas at the gallery. Grounded in sensation rather than representation, Time is Very Quick makes space for viewers to connect with their own inner worlds by delving into the infinite cosmoses of Lundsager’s paintings. Often beginning with a single horizontal line, Lundsager’s paintings are developed intuitively, though it’s an intuition built on decades of looking, living, and painting. The artist’s first mark determines the next. Accumulations occur, get erased, then reformed as her compositions bloom through her acute attention to and relationship with the material. Large swaths of color buttress against areas of delicate line work, melting into organic forms, evoking rolling hills, still waters and atmosphere, or even plant life. The combination of transcendental images with Lundsager’s expressive mark-making speaks to the complexity of the human experience. In the painting If it (2024), broad and bright brush strokes sweep across the top of the canvas, revealing slivers of another world just beyond the drips. Below the heat of the orange and yellow sweeps of color are two speckled masses that seem to have split apart, one floating in the atmosphere above its counterpart, reminiscent of a parent and child, evolving organisms, or even body and spirit. Eva Lundsager’s paintings are full of possibilities. The artist’s use of movement, form and rhythm in If it (2024) creates space on the painted surface and within the viewer to reflect, contemplate and dream. While Lundsager’s layered compositions often feel otherworldly, the presence of the artist’s hand in the work, developed through thirty-five years of painting, is unmistakable and deeply personal. Through rich color, energetic line, and impassioned form, the artist honors the complexity of life in all its forms. In the series Here we witness (2024), a single blue line is stretched across four canvases. Evolving between each image and leaving traces of itself behind along the way, the blue line becomes more complicated as it makes its journey. Spans of red and orange hover above the blue line throughout the series, until finally the two become one in the final canvas. The mesmerizing blue line, much like a horizon line, denotes the distinction between two beings or worlds, and its surrender to the red expanse above relates to the transformations and changes that we might experience in our own lives. The continuous line in Here we witness gently carries the viewer through time and space, speaking to the exhibition’s title Time is Very Quick, which is an adage Lundsager’s mother-in-law would often say.

In this new body of work, I continue to use my paintings as a way to honor my own regional history which I will always tie to my upbringing in North Missouri. I now realize that while these paintings started as a way to deal with the homesickness I felt after leaving my childhood hometown to pursue an MFA degree in an urban setting, it has become a way of creating some strange kind of souvenir of the places I left and the structures and things I knew most intimately. Even though I eventually took a job back in my home region, I’ve come to understand that in many ways, I’ll never be home again. This distance does, however, allow me to really see my home and be aware of my new role as a visitor in a way I wouldn’t be able to otherwise. My pride and passion for the rural Midwest remains as strong as it ever was, but now that comes through in my paintings like a witness’ perspective. Each time I return home to visit family, I notice that important landmarks are gone or have drastically changed. As a Midwesterner, I’ve always oriented myself on unique structures or distinctive features of the land. When an entire city block of hundred-plus-year-old buildings falls or significant homes or trees are demolished, I feel my internal compass shift. When so much else feels uncertain, using my home place as a way to center myself has felt steadying and necessary. I’m aware of how, over time, ways of life shape and define people and the places in which they live. Making these paintings helps me consider whether disappearance can be meaningful. And if so, in what way it’s meaningful for my home community and for myself. I’m considering where I’ll find “home” again and where I can “go back” to when trying to center myself. All places acquire layers of history. I’m hopeful that the shift I’m observing in my hometown is a cycle that has occurred before in one way or another. Maybe it looks different to a current resident than a visitor. - Sarah Williams, 2025

Over five years in the making, "Higher Ground" is a true tour de force by Huckaby, encompassing multiple installations that embrace the artist’s decades’ long connection to community, humanity, struggle, and spirituality. “I use art as social engagement. I use it for building up communities, I use it as a way to bring about positive change and to uplift . . .” From his grandmother’s kitchen table to the painted portraits of Ms. Opal Lee to the video installation commemorating the 1921 lynching of Mr. Fred Rouse in Fort Worth, Texas to over one hundred painted portraits of the community members of Nacimiento, Mexico and more, Huckaby’s "Higher Ground" spans generations of personal experience, history, connection, and importance. Having received the Fulbright Fellowship in 2022, Huckaby traveled to Nacimiento, Mexico in 2023 with the intention of creating one hundred portraits of people in the community in the span of four months. With his travel easel in hand and an interpreter at his side, the artist went from house to house in this small Mexican town, sitting down with each person to hear their story and create their portrait from life. He soon realized that he was not just creating portraits of people, but rather, a portrait of a community. “To acknowledge their presence, their work . . . just to sit down and do a portrait and listen to somebody. For me, it becomes an act of celebrating that person.” Huckaby’s one hundred portraits in this exhibition of the people of Nacimiento, Mexico depict a community deeply connected to their history, preserving their roots, customs, and connections to their Black lineage as well as celebrating the holiday of Juneteenth. In the mid-1800s this community’s ancestors, free Black Seminoles known as Mascogos fled through the southern Underground Railroad to Mexico where slavery had been strictly outlawed and in search of freedom. They founded the town originally known as El Nacimiento de los Negros and in an agreement with the Mexican government they agreed to protect the U.S. Mexican border from the invasion of American slave catchers and Texas Rangers who were crossing the border into Mexico in order to capture formerly enslaved people. In return, Mexico agreed to give the Mascogos citizenship and their own land. Huckaby traveled to this remote town in Mexico through his Fulbright Fellowship to experience the essence of the community members who, despite immense time, distance, and difference, cherish the same day of freedom that others celebrate in the United States. Through this heroic series of one hundred paintings on view in Higher Ground, Huckaby seeks to tell a tale of a community, shared legacy, and continental history. “When creating portrait from life with a sitter, I am seeing their heart, seeing who they are, knowing their aspirations . . . I bring the studio art practice directly into social engagement.” Huckaby’s tremendously moving video projection installation, "Contemplating Fred Rouse" and "Portrait of Fred Rouse," pays tribute to Mr. Fred Rouse who was publicly lynched in Huckaby’s hometown of Fort Worth, Texas in 1921. With no known images of Mr. Rouse, Huckaby created a video projection capturing his repetitive drawings of male figures being erased and redrawn, progressing from older men to his teenage son. As community research was done on Fred Rouse and his family, Mr. Rouse’s grandson was located in Fort Worth, Texas. With no knowledge of his grandfather’s fate, Fred Rouse III learned of his grandfather's tragic death. With the descendants of Mr. Rouse discovered, Huckaby created a second film, "Portrait of Fred Rouse," based upon portraits of Mr. Rouse’s son, grandson, and great grandson. “Then there is that engagement with the sitter that is beautiful and thoughtful and creative and then there is the opportunity for thoughtful change . . .” In the Project Gallery, Huckaby has created a site-specific installation entitled "Black Bird Redemption Song," consisting of fifteen caged black birds sculpted by the artist along with drawings of black birds. Housed in antique cages too small for the birds themselves, Huckaby reflects upon the history of incarceration within the Black Community in America. “Every struggle has its ups and downs of life and eventually goes through the very place that you are standing.” In Huckaby’s sculpture and installation, "Portrait of Craig Watkins," the artist recognizes and celebrates the legacy of the legendary Dallas Attorney who made history as the first elected African American District Attorney in Texas. As the Dallas District Attorney, Watkins created the first Conviction Integrity Unit in the nation resulting in 35 wrongly convicted individuals being freed under his administration. Watkins worked to resolve cases of wrongful conviction through the use of DNA testing and the review of evidence illegally withheld from defense attorneys. In this exhibition, Huckaby’s six foot five inches tall, life-size sculpture of Mr. Watkins is surrounded by mixed media works of drawings and papers representing the thirty-five men that Watkins freed.