Gene Parulis, Which Way

Gene Parulis

Visions and Explorations

March 2 – April 14, 2019
Opening: Saturday, March 2 5-7pm
Artist talk: Saturday, March 23 5pm

Travel and reflections (in all the varied senses of that term) provide the contents, the tools, and themes of this exhibition. Two winters ago in a statement about some of my pieces on display in this gallery, I wrote that since childhood I had been intrigued by the idea of a parallel universe and how I had always wanted to venture into the implicit “what if?” on the other side of the looking glass. I mentioned too my fascination with the rich seam or liminal zone where mirrored images coalesced and brought forth strange new forms, beings and ideas. This exhibition is a continuation of those explorations and could well be subtitled “New Adventures in the Mirrorverse.” Yet everything begins with an actual outward journey (I am not only referring to foreign travel but local wanderings. Being any place qualifies as travel if the mind and heart are in the right frame.) It is afterward, in the solitude of my digital laboratory with its powerful tools and subtle palettes, where I reflect on the deeper significance of where I have been and what I have brought back, revisiting, reworking, rearranging, expanding and always attempting, as my ultimate artistic mission, to convey somehow the revitalizing freshness of inspiring places and experiences. The mirrorverse flows with peculiar enchantment—startling, beguiling, humorous and profound at once. William Blake urged us to cleanse the doors of perception and, for me, venturing into the mirrorverse is just that. There, I am freed from expectations, logic and constraints; landscape becomes mindscape or soulscape and the improbable becomes possible. The Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones once remarked that his pictures were dreams of something that never was, and never would be—in a light better than any light that ever shone—in a land no one could define or remember, only desire. I’d like to think that my work, in its own way, mirrors those fabled intentions.