Pathways is a curatorial initiative within The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Open Studios program that highlights the creative processes behind contemporary artistic practice. Focusing on works in development as well as completed projects, it offers visitors insight into the research, experimentation, and critical thinking that shape each artist’s journey.

The artists selected for this pathway, working in painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation, anchor their practices in an undaunted commitment to the generative power of repetition. Within the constraints of their chosen parameters, their work fans out into astonishing variation achieved through persistent proliferation of a mark, a gesture, a form, or an idea. This kind of sustained investigation of a motif peels away new layers of meaning as minute differences accumulate into flickering constellations that reward deep engagement. For these artists, the formal operation becomes a means of profound evaluation of the contexts from which the subjects of their artistic contemplation arose: visual codes, natural structures, architecture, cultural heritage, overlooked objects, or linear geometry. Repetition also marks time–think of a cycle or a ritual. In excess, it brings about a temporal rupture, in which the progression from present to future becomes protracted by the thoroughgoing persistence of an idea that simply does not go away. In that iterative gap, where subtle variation sharpens perception, both metaphor and deconstruction can occur. The result, in each case, is mesmerizing and revelatory.

-Dominika Tylcz