Kaleidoscope Dreams

What new futures can be created if Americans stop pursuing the ideal of national unity and accept our reality as an incongruent collective?

The artists in this gallery use abstraction, geometry, surrealism, and color to explore ideas of incongruence and perception. The flexibility of the work encourages a closer look at our reality, suggesting that what we think we see is not what’s always there.

Frances Barth’s paintings are wholly individualistic and other than to say they are “radical abstractions” (Karen Wilkin), they are eccentric enough to elude classification. Barth refers to aspects of her work as a combination of comic restraint and purist abstraction. Combining contradictory elements of local color with abstract color, vocabularies of both painting and drawing, disorienting spatial relationships, Barth creates works that are as provocative fictive landscape abstractions.