ARTISTS:  John Abrams & Patrick DeCoste

EXHIBITION DATES: Friday, Oct 25 to Sunday, November 3, 2024.

OPENING RECEPTION: Saturday, October 26, from 3 to 5 p.m. (artists will be present)

HORSE & CROW is a two-person show featuring new installations by veteran painters John Abrams and Patrick DeCoste, curated by Carla Garnet. Horses and crows are very different animals, but they are present as the artists’ symbols, in the landscape, and recent and deeper histories mined. Their title, already literary, suggests relationships, a call and response, companionship, and antagonisms. Patrick DeCoste’s multimedia installation explores the “belle epoque” colonial period of Maritime Canada before the forced expulsion and genocide of the French settlers and the local Mi’kmaw people by the invading British Empire. An “end of an era” theme is present in John Abrams’ painting/video installation based on, “The Misfits,” a 1960s “anti-western/western” film penned by Arthur Miller and directed by John Huston starring Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, and Montgomery Clift. With their artwork, both artists ask how stories might persist in time employing their particular narrative as a space to look at our disconnection from the past and the future by investigating counter-imaginary in the present.