LEIDY CHURCHMAN

Churchman’s new paintings address our understanding of the nature of reality through our direct relationship with what lies before our eyes. They invite us into a world of signs and symbols that are both personal and specific, gently encouraging us to drop what we think we know about what’s going on.

Like the physical sensation before you jump into a body of water, plummet from a roller coaster, or take off in an airplane, the paintings in Heart Drop put us in the immediate. There’s no room for anything else. The past is gone. The future is uncertain. There is no solid ground beneath our feet. There is only the possibility of the moment.

According to the classic Buddhist text the Heart Sutra, this moment, the drop, the take-off, the plummet, itself is empty. Emptiness is not nothingness. It means that every experience, including our own emotions, is impossible to conceive. We call it empty because we can’t explain it.

Churchman cracks Magritte’s 1937 painting La reproduction interdite (Not to be Reproduced), into twenty jewel-like frames each with subtle differences. Magritte wrote, “The mind loves the unknown. It loves images whose meaning is unknown, since the mind itself is unknown.” With unfettered brushwork, Churchman embraces emptiness with multiple images dancing askew, giving us the sense that the painting could go on infinitely.

Churchman’s paintings illuminate the cracks that lie in any attempt to make things solid. Each painting is separate but connected in a way that disregards hierarchy. There is a free flow of engagement that is part philosophical investigation, part unadulterated horseplay.