For the inaugural exhibit in the gallery’s new space, artist Stephanie Hightower continues her exploration of painting.

The history and future of painting is a mistress, circling around herself. Like truth amidst conflict amidst beauty, she’s yet to be completely understood, often vilified, often adored. There will always be more questions than answers in affairs that don’t end - leaving one wanting, more.

Hightower’s new work is all about painting as she personally understands it to be, an informed process of perception and distillation, asserting itself on a physical and comprehensible plane, viscerally and instinctively.

Her process, like breathing in and out, is simple. Forms and ideas are retrieved, drawn in, gathered, and then spent. Starting from memory and experiences grounded in pedestrian observations and accidental jewels uncovered from unlikely sources, a painted experience evolves into a new moment for the taking. The painting then breathes on its’ own.

The work has always skated between alternating cones of representation and abstraction. Hightower paints intuitively and as honestly as one can, which allows her own idiosyncratic language and obsession for it to be and to invite inquiry.

Hightower’s art practice is painting and drawing. This is her vehicle for observation, reflection, and action. Her ideas and concerns are presented as a hybrid of representational and abstract imagery.

The artist has always been interested in referencing ideas of hierarchy within contemporaneous entities, where the aggressive and regressive converge. Within this spectrum, groupings and polarities emerge, but do not dominate. Polarities and parties are sustained, but without privilege. This brings the artist to speculation and desire amidst navigation and logic.