Night Gallery is pleased to announce Claire Colette’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, Shoot Forth Thunder, a presentation of works on canvas and paper. Furthering Colette’s distinct painterly grammar, the paintings uncover the potency within elemental forces, merging organic and inorganic materials toward each painting’s own agency. Beginning with a ritualistic slow build of the surface using a repeated vernacular of gridded lines, acrylic, ash, salt, resin, and dried flowers applied with non-traditional tools perhaps more akin to building—air brushes, rulers, masking tape—the materials activate the works as symbiotic, resolute bodies; alchemical conduits for material and supernatural energies. Colette’s systemic approach underpins the inherent structure of the paintings which yield personal and ideological landscapes. Their human-scaled verticality and muted palettes orient us in between familiar existential dichotomies: sky and earth, day and night, birth and death. Raised molding paste trails emerge from grids of airy blues and Los Angeles-dusk soft pinks, creating a mysterious and tangible topography that could be tree roots, buoy lines, umbilical cords, or desire paths—connective tissue mapping the visual plane. Colette’s repeated language of half moons and crosses appear as constellation-like directional guides, lifeboats for the journey. The works on paper function like crumbs on a path or notes in margins; highly viscous layers of paint are built up and carved out to reveal the elemental forces that comprise matter. Perhaps the only subject in the history of painting immune from the display of hierarchies or a politics, unpopulated landscapes rarely portray the trappings of human constructions—one can’t own the sky. Instead, they function as liminal spaces outside of linear time where moments of deeper knowing are possible: to rest, to grieve, to commune with natural forces, to calibrate a next move. In this pastoral reverie, thunderous insights have the space to strike. Shoot Forth Thunder references Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part II, in which the speaker yearns for the power embedded in thunder to enact justice in earthly matters. Metaphorically and mythologically, thunder is the catalyst for transformation and the deliverer of karma from which a subject’s path is irrevocably altered. Within each of Colette’s paintings a visual disruption to the soothing symmetry appears: flashes of earthy, opaque micaceous iron oxide hover above and below, at times in thin gashes, at others spilling out in overwhelming chasms. These visual and metaphorical thunderbolts dislodge the stable system of the painting, pushing the viewer to make a navigational and philosophical decision. At the precipice of these voids we can choose to proceed through passageways where we face unknown futures. Much like the journey of grief, these portals also remind us of the infinite potential in beginnings: for new systems, for justice, for utopia. A centerpiece of the show pulls its title from the following: I was sent from the power And have come to those who contemplate me And am found among those who seek me ….For I am the first and the last… The Thunder/Perfect Mind Nag Hammadi Scriptures -Megan Reed Image: Claire Colette ____ Night Gallery is proud to present Relic, Reliquary, Requiem, an exhibition of objects by Dan John Anderson. This is the artist’s debut solo show with the gallery. An undertone of exchange runs through Anderson’s newest body of work; the pragmatism and skill of craft traditions finds dialogue with sculpture’s formalism. A reverence for natural materials (namely wood, and here, redwood and cedar) is reflected by the intense physicality of Anderson’s practice. His process is one of elimination, paring down layers of raw wood until something essential reveals itself, the ritualized intensity of the activity negotiating internal and external space. Relic, Reliquary, Requiem is born of a lifelong ethos of communion with nature. Growing up in rural Eastern Washington and now living in Yucca Valley, California, Anderson’s foundational language is experiential, shaped by days spent in sun-bleached expanses of trees, rocks, sand, grass. For Anderson, the sculptural potential of subtraction relates strongly to erosion: natural forces of movement have gradually shaped the desert washes and serrated shorelines of the West Coast that he knows intimately. This influence manifests as subtle patterns and textures that appear as innate as the range of a landscape. Anderson’s works seem to stand outside of time, anchored by a corporeal continuity between the two largest sculptures on view. An imposing set of hands, burned and black, reach skyward, either emerging from or sinking into the Earth. Warm-toned stained glass at the center allows traces of light to come through the dark palms. Elsewhere, a head is partially submerged in the ground, its eyes in cast bronze almost glowing with a blank stare. The interrelation between fragments of the body foregrounds an understanding of art as techne—or, as described by the artist, a “thinking with your hands” that melts the sharp distinctions between art and craft, and the activities of the conscious and subconscious mind. Among the recognizably figurative forms, gestures toward abstraction offer room for looser interpretation. Collar, 2025 stands tall, monument-like, its central feature holding the striking possibilities of Anderson’s method. A redwood pot evokes the timeless, archetypal quality of a vessel to act as a container for the discrete and disparate, while the encircling web motif suggests nonlinear time. These enigmatic works encourage curiosity in viewers, acknowledging an inevitability of the imagination to operate independently of an artist’s intention. The mind moves, rain indents soil, rocks slide into the ocean. Erosion is contradictory, at once making and eliminating slow evidence of what’s happened. In Relic, Reliquary, Requiem, Anderson brings a more cosmic but deeply human consideration to this phenomenon—we amount to how we spend our time and where we place our efforts. Everything else falls away. -Jayne Pugh