Before writing this, I traveled to spend a night in my cabin in the Ozark Mountains that I helped build decades ago. The cabin, situated in a now overgrown field next to a stream, protects from the elements and teeming life. It being May, fire pinks flashed red up the rocky stream bank, the untamed springs crossed the barely defined road creating vernal pools where tadpoles incubate. Tangles of diverse growth tumble and unfurl towards re-wilding. The house is a temporary guest in the woods, and if capitalist forces don’t devour this wild pocket, the woods will win in the long game of time. Parallel to studio practices, being immersed in the natural world necessitates carving a space for oneself and slowing down to recalibrate to the sensory environment of light, sound, expectation, and experience.

Through art making, one becomes a metaphorical coaxer, weaver, gleaner, extractor, resonator, rewilder, diviner. Making helps us to become necessarily lost, to be curious, to move materials before words form, to see and be confronted by something confounding, affirming, and new.

As I reviewed the submissions for this edition of I Like Your Work, I recognized that nature and landscape, and ever complex personal relationships to place, time, and cosmology, connected many works.

Some works consider connections between natural environments, biological, political, cultural, and environmental histories that are intrinsically tied to the landscape. Ana Sinnett’s piece, Topographic Memory, explores Salvadoran cultural memory through Indigenous folklore, and añil (indigo) dyeing. quinn mcnichol’s, and so this garden grows, Ciudad de México, features medicinal plants and explores a safe haven for queer bodies, highlighting the healing aspects of nature. In contrast, Jason Sho Green’s lantern sculpture, The Wall, suggests a figure yearning for an unseen world beyond the wall. The light filling a man’s form seems to be drawn from an unseen source on the other side, reminiscent of a 19th century woodcut known as the Flammarion Engraving, which depicts a seeker pushing his head through the firmament, from night to day.

Some works highlight nature as a provider of physical sustenance, and others see nature as a dreamlike realm that elicits wonder, suggests magic, transcendental searching, and considers our place within and connection to the cosmos.

Ben Pranger’s Sky Portals, a labyrinthine space reminiscent of insect and bird’s nests, suggests something ancient and potentially futuristic. Dana Oldfather’s Starscreen transcends the shadow of environmental crisis with an ecstatic sense of color, as an eclipse event takes place and a moth-like silhouette overlays a summer field aglow in warm light. The warm color of a late summer sunset reminds us of our transience and impermanence. Emily Weiskopf’s dark violet translucent pyramid titled, Physical Night, has a primordial elemental quality suggestive of a spiritual totem. Isabel Oliva’s tapestry, To Drink From the Dream River, reads as smoke, water, sky, or an altered state, and timeless magic.

In Hong Yang’s Fish Whisperer, a hand holds a shimmery fish on a line, while in the distance a surreal scene reminiscent of Bosch shows a small figure has drawn a fish close to the shore’s edge. Benjamin Heiken’s painting, Moon, feels simultaneously direct and oblique, with its tactile spelling of the word moon, like a tarot card inviting us to visualize. Kayla Edmonston’s collage titled waves watch for stars too, depicts a sweet scene, two figures immersed in water, their backs to us facing the star-filled sky. Another wonder eliciting nocturne, Night Migration, by Emily Church depicts numerous birds, butterflies, and morning glory vines. Requiring slower looking, Christian Platt’s delicately and incrementally painted work titled Compass suggests the solar system and maintains a sense of mystery.

Some of these works have an eidolic quality that feel imbued with memory and can at times transgress material boundaries. Melissa Dadourian’s ephemeral work, Rosey Sky, made of woven dusky colors suggests a fading liminal sky. Evoking a faded memory, Josue Bessiake’s painting, a house full of bad listeners, shows two heads in profile separated by architectural divisions, while a shadow of a tree connects the distance between them. Eleanor Conover’s painting/ construction, After Addison, explores metaphors for environmental time and space through material, color, and shape on an 8 sided constructed canvas that bows, creating a convex form.

Under the looming shadow of ecological and environmental disasters, political strife imposes boundaries between peoples and wages endless wars. Lives are lost, natural habitats are poisoned and eradicated, bodies are politicized. In Tamsen Wojtanowski’s toned cyanotype titled Inside Stitches, symmetrical forms depict a uterus overlaid with leafy patterns, as two snakes form the fallopian tubes/ ovaries and simultaneously the nipples of breasts. The dreamlike quality of Elham Bayati’s work utilizes floral motifs drawn from textiles belonging to her mother and grandmother to explore emotional landscapes of displacement, personal history and Iranian cultural identity. Viktorsha Uliyanova’s installation of cyanotypes on textiles, quieter than water lower than grass, suggests memories of soviet era landscape through architecture. Katie Butler’s painting, Eat or Be Eaten, resonates with Vanitas and Memento Mori still life traditions and speaks to food desserts and wealth disparity: a stately but rotting display of fruit is juxtaposed against a landscape of Family Dollar and McDonalds. In Alice Pixley Young’s Garden II, a delicate environment under threat is indicated by a standalone tree surrounded by orange construction site netting.

Levity and humor are found in Madeline Winter’s Let’s Roll (Home for Curfew), Erin Perrazzelli’s A group of moths enjoying a delicious wool blanket, and Teresa Dunn’s painting, All Yellow (Morgan Hill). The light and natural forms found in Joan Hanley, Georganna Price, and Hal Hardin are at times fugitive and share a formal interest in intentionally conflating forms to create complex spaces.

Finally, some works take a phenomenological view of the everyday. The sand mixed into the paint in Mike Dowley’s night, starboard reads sensorially. Intense blue evokes night air, while the title conveys that the view is seen from a passing boat. Awash in subtly shifting light, color is deeply experienced in Rachel Wren’s Daydream, which shows a stand of trees emerging out of a field of marks. Jason Lipow and Heather Brown’s works provide a sense of unknowing and discovery rooted in process, reaffirming painting as a site of experience through the language of material and color.

I'm grateful to all of the artists who submitted their work for this issue. Much like planning a party, I wanted to invite everyone, but the publication was limited to a selection of 30 artists, making the process a challenge, both rewarding and anxious. It was energizing to see all of the incredible work that was submitted and to consider the connections between works and how they can be in conversation together.