Lillian Warren's 'On the Edge of Tomorrow'
While wandering through her neighborhood near the Museum District where she and her husband have lived for seven years, Warren saw and experienced her familiar surroundings in an entirely new way. “Life felt so precarious, which heightens your senses,” says Warren. “I started getting interested in that very ordinary landscape that most of the time you completely ignore.” Inspired by Smartphone photos she took of that “ordinary” landscape, Warren created a mysterious, and beautiful new body of work: Constructed Realities, a series of oil and acrylic urban landscapes on view beginning March 3 at Anya Tish Gallery. Works by Marfa-based painter Ann Marie Nafziger will be exhibited as well.
Constructed Realities is dramatically different from Warren’s humorous, pre-pandemic series, Story Telling, where portraits of friends, colleagues, and volunteer models appear within the pages of re-imagined illuminated manuscripts. “My paintings have gone back and forth from being of absolutely nobody to being full people,” laughs Warren. “The commonality for me is an overarching interest in liminal spaces — in-between, transitional spaces and states of mind.”
Although paying attention to what people typically overlook is a time-honored tradition in contemporary art, the paintings in Constructed Realities are not literal, representational renderings of “real” places. Back at her studio after her walks, Warren used Photoshop to grab an object from one photo, place it into another, and construct a scene that captured what she was feeling at the time, rather than what she saw. Interestingly, whether it’s an outrageously painted dumpster or an abandoned toy, Warren doesn’t think of the objects in these paintings as part of a concrete narrative. “I see them more as symbolic of how odd our lives are,” says Warren, “and how casually we discard things and leave traces behind.” Color is also used poetically in Constructed Realities, often suggesting an emotional state. But Warren takes great pains to avoid “the realm of melodrama” and instead bring the viewer into a “liminal” space.
'Reconsider Where We Belong' by Lillian Warren
Ann Marie Nafziger's 'Cactus Witching'
The connection between Constructed Realities and Nafziger’s abstract paintings of “wild and remote” landscapes may be how attentive each artist is to their respective surroundings. “They come from a sense of being very present in our current environment,” says Warren of her and Nafziger’s work. Both artists value the act of slowing down and paying attention, although Warren admits her recurring motif of dumpsters in all kinds of unexpected colors is a slight dig at our culture of consumption. “We generate so much trash!” says Warren.
With her first post-pandemic show just around the corner, Warren is perfectly content to leave room for the viewer to come up with their own ideas and feelings about what they will see. “To me, as I look at the paintings, the emotion that comes across is a kind of quiet loneliness,” says Warren. “But then maybe a quiet joy from the unexpected beauty that comes from being present.”
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Nicky Sohn (photo by Julia Gang); Kayla Collymore (photo by Mark Henderson); Mary Grace Johnson (photo by Natalie Gaynor)
Sohn has since overcome those doubts to become a sought-after, internationally recognized composer, with recent orchestral commissions from and performances by the National Orchestra Institute and Festival with Marin Alsop, the Sarasota Orchestra, and the Aspen Philharmonic Orchestra under Hugh Wolff. She is currently the composer-in-residence of Houston’s Kinetic Ensemble, a 16-member string orchestra that performs without a conductor, and actively supports the creation of new music in a field all-to-often devoid of diversity. On March 3 at MATCH, Kinetic celebrates Women’s History Month with Her Story, a program of music by women composers featuring the world premiere of Sohn’s violin concerto Home, with soloist Mary Grace Johnson and three dancers moving to choreography by Kayla Collymore. The concert also includes Amy Beach’s String Quartet in One Movement and Gabriela Lena Frank’s Leyendas for string orchestra.
Home takes its inspiration from the stories of three graduates of The Women’s Home, which offers residential treatment and a transitional housing program for homeless women struggling with addiction and mental illness. During the pandemic, DACAMERA’s Young Artist Program facilitated the opportunity for Sohn and Johnson to connect with residents of The Women’s Home and hear their stories. The experience inspired Sohn to compose a short piece for violin and piano titled Fresh Breath of Hope, and soon after its premiere, she and Johnson began discussing the possibility of doing something more ambitious.
Kinetic Ensemble (photo by Jeff Grass)
“The stories the women shared with us were really powerful, and we felt the need to write a bigger piece,” says Sohn. With the goal of creating something more expansive, Sohn, Johnson and Collymore interviewed three recent graduates of The Women’s Home to learn about their recovery. “One thing they shared that I found inspiring was that you get to write your next chapter,” says Sohn. “Whatever you have been through, that’s not the end of your story and the future is up to you to create.”
Although not specifically programmatic, Home does convey in musical language the transformative journey each graduate of The Women’s Home experienced. “Sharing their stories was a very vulnerable thing to do,” says Sohn, “so I felt the responsibility to deliver what they shared in a very honorable way.” Having worked with Sohn throughout the compositional process, Collymore’s choreography is closely matched to the music and provides another layer of expressivity and emotion to the work.
Looking back on her own story, Sohn is pleased to now be teaching four exceptionally talented female composition students and hopes her field is on its way to becoming a more diverse and equitable career path for young musicians.
“I really hope that I am the last generation to feel uncomfortable for being who I am,” says Sohn. “Because I signed up to be a composer. I didn’t sign up to be a female composer.”
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