The passing back and forth of ideas in painting is like the relay and return of the knotted patterns in the game of cat’s cradle. Each painting is a string configuration that we hold out to be received by another, or that we receive and respond to by adding something new, by proposing another knot, another net. Entangled in a myriad of configurations, we start from a place that doesn’t wipe out what comes before – we make paintings of inheritances and remembering.

10 X Relay includes artists: Kylie Heidenheimer, Pinkney Herbert, Erick Johnson, Jackie Meier, Laura Newman, Pierre Obando, Jennifer Riley, Russell Roberts, Lisa Taliano, and Chuck Webster.  It is a celebration and recognition of these artists’ indebtedness to each other as friends and painters. Companions in conflict and collaboration, the artists in this show are tied together by the threads of thinking and making, bound together in the knotted net of painting.

The Cat’s Cradle, String Figures, metaphor is borrowed from radical interdisciplinary scholar, Donna Harraway.  String Fingers is more than just a metaphor for Harraway – it is a theoretical methodology for “cultivating the art of living and dying on a damaged planet”.  Through her teachings she encourages us to embrace the entangled mess that we are in, build coalitions across disciplines, pass back and forth the knotted patterns we’ve inherited, understand the past and be accountable for the future.