Art can help us understand ourselves, connect with others, and work through experiences that are difficult to put into words. It can be a source of comfort, a way to process change, or simply a reason to keep moving forward into the next day. For some artists, making art is part of healing. For others, healing comes through looking, sharing, and finding connection in the work of others.
This exhibition brings together artists working in ceramics, mosaic, painting, and textile soft sculpture, each approaching the idea of healing in their own way.
Theo Gins
Artist Statement
There are two concepts I hold to about this life: the absurd and the sublime. Everything I do is the conversation between. Living, as in the act of life, is absurd. But life as existence, as a world unfolding, is sublime. For life is seeing, trying to understand, and not knowing if you get it right. I like to ask questions. Questions that pop up again and again, answered in different ways, answered in conflicting ways, and answered in different stories with different outcomes.
I seek to juxtapose the horrors of life with the beauty of death, and vice versa, or either/or, or none of the above, or all of the above. And isn’t that liberating? Striving for answers that are impossible to achieve? In accepting that unknowability, I can grow, experiment, and find joy. It’s the terrifying ordeal of never quite knowing, but the glorious act of getting to ask anyway.
Fairy tales are how I approach that impossibility, for fairy tales are quintessentially absurd and sublime, obvious and ambiguous.
My work also deals with my mental illness and identity. I deal through conversation. Honest conversation. Brutal and bloody conversation. I may be a depressed nihilist, but in my heart, I am a Romantic. Nature is beautiful and dangerous, and more beautiful for its danger, and more dangerous for its beauty. I hope my work expresses that Romanticism in the most Gothic way possible. Because yes, a tree is beautiful, but is not a dead one more interesting? I stare at the oddities of nature, for the beauty is in the mess and the rot and the degradation.
What other way is there to experience the horrors, than to romanticize them?
Biography
Theo Gins is a storyteller first, and an artist second. They graduated from the University of Sioux Falls with a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts, majoring in English literature and art. Inspired by fairy tales, they investigate the world through absurd and fantastic stories. His art is a visual manifestation of those stories, drawing from traditional and modern aesthetics. A painter, illustrator, and hobby-crocheter, Theo dabbles in a plethora of artistic mediums (though, he wouldn’t claim to be good at any of them).