ELEMENTS: WATER

Elements: Water
Opening 6 - 8 pm, First Thursday, February 2
February 2 - 18, 2023

Foster/White Gallery returns to its series of group exhibitions focused on the classical elements with Elements: Water, featuring a range of media from photography and collage to painting, textile, and sculpture. Following its predecessors Elements: Earth (2020) and Elements: Fire (2021), the latest thematic collection draws from both new and prior work by many of the gallery's artists. Representations of water alternate from figurative to abstract, and while the color blue is a popular choice, especially for painters, there are wonderful departures from expectation.

Ancient philosophers as diverse as Heraclitus and Lao Tzu recognized the fascinating qualities of this form of matter, calling our attention to the ways in which water "...is fluid, soft, and yielding. But [it] will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. This is another paradox: what is soft is strong,” wrote Lao Tzu, while the most famous of Heraclitus' fragments distinguishes that we "cannot step twice in the same river," since it would imply that "we both are and are not."