"The Beauty of Stillness" exhibition catalog

beauty of stillness

Cover: Exhibition view, InLiquid Gallery The Sheep That Was Born Without Wool Daria Panichas 50 x 36" Archival ink on Hahnemühle FineArt Baryta, frame

Following page: Exhibition view, The Beauty of Stillness, InLiquid Gallery

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Crispness is in the air. A modest destabilization. Your jacket crossed tight to guard against a chilly wind. A confusion. Ennui. Loneliness. Autumn, though full of decay, has a marked beauty, like a poem written in longing. Like the season of fall itself, the four artists of The Beauty of Stillness conjure tender reflective moments that are marked by pangs of uncertainty, yearning, and beauty.

Bay Wraiths

Geoffrey Ansel Agrons 11 x 8"

Platinum-palladium print on hand-coated Arches Platine paper

Opposite (left to right)

Bay Wraiths, Geoffrey Ansel Agrons, Thaw I, Richard Hricko, Centipedion, Geoffrey Ansel Agrons

Exhibition view, InLiquid Gallery Timeline Richard Hricko 48 x 120" Woodcut on Kitakata

For Your Consideration

TheBeautyofStillness @The InLiquid Gallery

by Alice Chambers

In The Beauty of Stillness, four artists lead us on a rediscovery of nature. Unified chromatically through the use of grayscale tones and thematically through the use of organic forms and subject matter, their works divorce us from our assumptions about the natural world. Stripped of any frame of reference we might gain from color, movement, sound, or smell, our eyes have to work to determine what we are looking at. The Beauty of Stillness prompts contemplation about our place in nature and reveals how even the simplest of subjects can house entire microcosms — if only we sit still long enough to observe them.

Daria Panichas creates thought-provoking photographs that function similarly to Rorschach inkblots: at first glance, a birds-eye view of a sheep can appear as a nebulous amoeba, a cottony seed pod, or even a fibrous crystal depending on the viewer. (Continued)

Exhibition view, InLiquid Gallery

Liminal Spaces

Constance McBride

From the Sonoran Preserve, AZ : Ceramic coated debris and raw desert debris, sand, branches, cacti spines, animal bones.

This subversion of expectations teaches us to slow down and pay attention to the world around us. By accepting Panichas’ invitation to peel back the layers of our presumptions and take a second look, we amplify the wonder we feel when we do finally recognize the sheep. Additionally, the dramatic contrast between light subject matter and dark background operates as a kind of spotlight, elevating even the smallest budding leaf to the status of a crown jewel.

Richard Hricko fills the picture plane of his photogravures with layers of undulating organic forms, some familiar and others slightly

alien. Like Panichas, Hricko plays with scale and perspective, forcing us to adjust our own viewpoints and mindfully consider the image before us. Some of his compositions read as snapshots of miniscule universes, microscopic tableaus made visible only through scientific imaging. Then, our eye drifts to another portion of the image, moving onto the next of Hricko’s visual clues, and we’re no longer as certain about what exactly we are looking at. This ambiguity permits multiple interpretations of the same image to coexist and allows us to take our own journey of discovery.

(Detail) Liminal Spaces, Constance McBride

Geoffrey Agrons’ ethereal, atmospheric photographs carry a certain gravity about them. He utilizes abstraction to a lesser degree than Hricko and Panichas; however, though his subject matter is more immediately apparent to a viewer, his work encourages contemplation through the open-ended questions it generates. How have the locations in Agrons’ photographs changed since he captured them? If we visited them ourselves, how would our experience of these landscapes differ from that of Agrons’, or that of any other person who might wander by? The realization that the worlds in Agrons’ photographs no longer exist as they did when he

immortalized them on film reminds us of life’s temporality. Human experiences can never be recreated exactly, a fact which is at once melancholy and hopeful, as it gives us the opportunity to make each moment anew.

Finally, Constance McBride takes us into three dimensions with her sculptural installation. What we would see as randomly discarded rubble in any other setting causes us to pause, as we know that these items are anything but random. In fact, we recognize that they have been carefully arranged, and as we move about the installation, we seek to uncover the meaning McBride has left for us. (Continued)

(Detail) Timeline, Richard Hricko

The installation’s whitened debris, which includes bones, branches, and ceramic forms, rests on a bed of sand. Crucially, by including broken pieces of ceramic human limbs, McBride evokes the natural cycle of birth and decay, referencing the concept that we are from dust, and to dust we shall return.

By focusing on humble subject matter — the roots and leaves we tread underfoot, the landscapes and litter we’ve come to regard as commonplace due to our own overexposure — the four artists

represented in The Beauty of Stillness break us out of the mundane. Their works reveal the wonders of the natural world so transient, so fragile, and so close at hand if only we would stop to notice them. By limiting their color palettes to shades of gray and utilizing organic subject matter which remains open for interpretation, Panichas, Hricko, Agrons, and McBride welcome viewers to meditate on their art, and, indeed, to consider The Beauty of Stillness.•

Image: Exhibition view, InLiquid Gallery

The Sheep That Was Born Without Wool, Daria Panichas

About The Author

Alice Chambers is a Houston native who is passionate about the visual arts and eager to pursue writing, research, and content creation as a career. Using her background in the digital humanities, she hopes to collaborate with individuals and institutions in the art world sharing their stories through innovative digital platforms. She has written promotional and educational content about art, culture, and history in both academic and commercial settings. Though British art of the nineteenth century remains her academic focus, living in Houston has developed her love for the city’s vibrant scene of Latin American and contemporary art. Chambers currently works at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston as Collections Assistant for the Hirsch Library.

Exhibition view, InLiquid Gallery (left to right) Meadowsweet, Tesserae (each) Daria Panichas 18 x 12" Archival ink on Hahnemühle photo rag; UV glass

Geoffrey AnselAgrons

Geoffrey Ansel Agrons is a self-taught photographer living in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He previously lived for many years in Cape May, NJ, where he first grew interested in photography that explored the uneasy coexistence between human populations and the natural world. Agrons is particularly intrigued by the range of contradictory emotional responses to the land-water interface, the ambiguity of natural and man-made objects encountered at the seaside between twilight and dawn, and the tension between nature and human expectations of permanence and control.

Eisgeist Geoffrey Ansel Agrons 11 x 14" Gelatin silver prints from digital negative

Richard Hricko

Richard Hricko is a printmaker whose work presents composite details of the natural and built environment that honor nature, industry, and the course of decay and recovery. Influenced by the tradition of ruins in Italian art, he similarly expresses the passage of time and invokes longing and the pathos of things forgotten, but from a uniquely magnified perspective. He embraces new technologies and experimental approaches to his medium as well as the traditional skills and focus of the master printer. Layering such disparate ideas and techniques, he explores the generative fusion of real and imaginary worlds.

Hricko has exhibited work nationally and internationally in museums and galleries including, International Print Center New York, the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition in New York, Tanks Art Centre in Australia, PH21 Gallery in Budapest, Hungary, and the National Academy Museum in New York. Most recently he won 1st place in Experimental Prints at the 2nd Triennial of Contemporary Graphic Arts at Novosibirsk State Art Museum in Russia. In the mid-2000s he cofounded Crane Arts, where he currently maintains his studio. He also co-founded and serves on the board of Second State Press, a community-based printmaking studio.

Thaw I

Richard Hricko 20 x 15"

Copperplate Photogravure on Somerset Satin

Liminal Spaces

Constance McBride

Dimensions variable

From Berks and Chester county PA: Tree bits and branches, Sacred Oak tree bark, sand

Constance McBride

Constance McBride works in ceramic sculpture, installations and mixed media. Recent awards include a position in the 2021 Chautauqua Visual Arts Summer Residency Program in Chautauqua, New York and grants from Philadelphia Sculptors, Phoenix Art Museum's Contemporary Forum and the Arizona Commission on the Arts. Her work is exhibited nationally in the USA and was recently in a traveling exhibition at venues in The Netherlands, Belgium and France. Other notable exhibitions include a solo at Tubbs Gallery (Rehoboth Beach, DE) a group show at Fowler-Kellogg Art Center (Chautauqua, NY), CraftForms at Wayne Art Center (Wayne, PA), a Contemporary Forum Grant Recipients show at Phoenix Art Museum (Phoenix, AZ), The Clay Studio National (Philadelphia, PA) and Beyond the Brickyard at Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts (Helena, MT). In 2018, McBride spent five weeks as a facilitator/art educator at Sias University in Xinzheng and villages in and around Zhengzhou, Henan Province, China via a World Academy for the Future of Women and US State Department grant. Her work has received attention from several publications including Yahoo News Cities Rising series, Philly Artblog, Cleaver Magazine and the international magazines Inspirational and Ceramics Now. Currently based in Chester Springs, PA she is actively involved with art communities in and around the Delaware Valley. McBride earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Arcadia University, Glenside, PA.

Daria Panichas

With a style that is clean and direct yet evocative and sometimes otherworldly, Daria Panichas’s monochromatic fine art photographs are intimate, thoughtful meditations on simple, often seemingly mundane things in her immediate environment.

By distilling these unassuming subjects into unexpected, graceful forms, they morph into new shapes and scenes that often provoke fascinating associations and memories among viewers.

Although initially drawn to photography through the street and documentary work of Sebastião Salgado, Clemens Kalischer and Josef Koudelka, her primary inspiration and influence is early 20th century Japanese American photography, as well as the philosophical approach of photographers Sean Tucker and Douglas Beasley.

Daria graduated from Lafayette College with a bachelor’s degree in art and philosophy, completing an honors thesis in painting. After earning a master’s degree in social work at Boston University, she also became certified in web design and development. Her photography education has been self-directed, through classes, workshops and interactions with artists.

The More Humble and Less Notorious Rivulet Daria Panichas 18 x 12"

Archival ink on Hahnemühle photo rag; UV glass

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