Gathering

The feeling of summer… To me, it implies friends and flowers. Leaning solely on this impression, we are presenting Gathering at the Corner Gallery in Andes, New York. Summer is the unhurried season of long utopic days spent with friends. Gathering after months of being apart in a moment of convergence, this exhibition is a reinvigorating circle of friends in the countryside. Guided by love and kinship, an economy of scale, and our interest in this way of connecting, we invited a group of artists to send us a work on paper representing the summer wildflower of their choice via postal mail.

In many cultures, flowers, real or represented, are used to express feelings. These phenomena of nature become the carriers of appreciation, love, joy, sympathy, friendship and care, while also often conveying or awakening the poetic. With the efflorescence of each bloom, there is also the idea of absolute — non transactional — generosity. In this Catskills space, a meadow of humble blooms is chorally formed and offered. A singular herbarium appears from the plurality of voices and locations gathered.

An herbarium that conveys time, observation and connection. An herbarium that embodies the idea of interrelatedness. A network, as a form of being, comes through. An archipelago of friendship appears. Friendship, a place of flourishing — and sometimes even reinvention — of the self, can also be a place where life can be transformed, even socially and politically. Friendship as a way of life: with love as matrix, it becomes a place of tangible and accessible utopia.

Anne Couillaud