“I kept coming back to this route for respite from my work and for my work too, because thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do. It’s best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking. Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. It is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals. After all those years of walking to work out other things, it made sense to come back to work close to home, in Thoreau’s sense, and to think about walking.”1 The Pit is pleased to present Three Miles an Hour, a solo exhibition by Joani Tremblay including nine new oil paintings. Joani Tremblay mines virtual, physical, remembered, and real places to create composited landscape and skyscape paintings in oil. In these works, idyllic expanses are framed by fragments of built environments such as thresholds and architecture. Tremblay’s imagined landscapes evoke hard-edged sublimity honed particularly in early Modernism with highly structured and stylized annotations on color, line, and composition, creating meditative, frozen moments that befuddle linear time. Celebrations of natural light; studies of crenelated land and sky; brushwork that combines hard lines with blends — these moves may nod to artists like Agnes Pelton and Judy Chicago’s early feminist works, yet Tremblay’s paintings are more about crafting architecture and perception through labor-intensive, digital collage processes. Resembling that of a flâneur, Tremblay’s process has her meandering through vast sources of inspiration and streams of thought, in a balance akin to walking. The balance in Tremblay’s process is as much about doing as it is about breathing — as much about producing as it is about pausing. This paradox is crumpled and ironed out again, like paper, as moments in the paintings fold, curl, shadow, and highlight deep perception. In this exhibition, Tremblay continues her series about the relentless heat of the sun and its potential for transference — symbolized here by interstitial moments. Intuitively painted hours of twilight are perhaps an unconscious reflection of our year, creating a sense of an in-between time. Juicy fruits and sun-soaked flowers populate canvas edges, rims and frames denote enclosure as if peeping through caves or windows. Crimsons, russets, warm cadmium yellows, and citrus hues are cooled by blues in color wheel oppositions. Depictions of the stark mystery of isolation — the single bud, the lone horizon — are evocatively expressed through alluring, rich, and lavish turns. 1 Solnit, Rebecca. “Wanderlust: A History of Walking” Penguin Books (2001) __ The Pit is pleased to present Dreamer, a solo exhibition of paintings by Howard Fonda that celebrate Earth’s insanely rad beauty by populating pointillistic portraits of goddesses, plants & animals with wilderness, natural history, and pastoralism. This new body of work continues Fonda’s habit of depicting heavy duty events — birth, death, spiritual transcendence — with subversively bright strokes of short + sweet, that welcome viewers seeking hypnosis through visual anesthetics. But in keeping with the world’s finest paintings and religious iconography, eye candy and gravitas peacefully coexist here. Gorgeous color choices claw up surfaces, as if a voracious honey badger is remodeling Seurat. Wide lexicons that blend New Age and Native American celebration undermine and renew cliché with a special type of sincere syncretism that comes from deep wells of authentic emotion, historical awareness, and investment in social justice. Divine seers, entombment, animal messengers, the erudite perfection of a floral arrangement — Fonda considers how archetypes slip into pop cultural usage, sometimes imperiling historical context. This candid approach to subject matter is reiterated in Fonda’s painting techniques, about which he has said: “I wanted to make the work direct and honest. I wanted viewers to be able to see the process and eliminate a hierarchy of material layers. Everything is essentially on the same plane, laid wet into wet. Mistakes can't simply be covered, they must be addressed and integrated into the composition. I came to enjoy the tension, the tight rope walk of failure…I'm really drawn to work that risks or exposes failure.” With a history degree, he always has his “eye on the past - particularly the maligned, the powerless, the persecuted. With some pause, I'm also drawn to things that are distinctly "American" — Transcendental thought, jazz, African-American history, and the indigenous peoples of this part of the world.” Fonda’s brushy morse code lends flora and fauna scenes, in particular, cosmic audibility. Small still lifes featuring early spring floral bouquets — campanula, tulip— camouflaged against densely patterned vases, tables, and walls triple-translate histories of botanical ornamentation while still, somehow miraculously, evoking disorienting dimensionality. Jungles are harmonious utopias, chirping and howling Rousseau-style. Upside-down tree of life, rainbow birth canal sharing hand-mirror space with a skull, multi-eyed seers and haloed mothers all nod gracefully to Vanitas by scooping Medieval Art into a casual array that equally suits ancient altar and t-shirt graphic. Nice, weird, delicious, and spooky, these visionary works irresistibly yield to play and love.