TIME AS A SANCTUARY
by John Felix Arnold III
June 24 - August 15, 2021
Artist Talk moderated by William Paul Thomas, August 15, 2:00pm
Photographs by: Sally Van Gorder
Anchorlight presents Time as a Sanctuary, an exhibition of drawing, painting, mixed media, assemblage, installation, and video from John Felix Arnold III. This exhibition addresses ways we can comprehend and convey the experience of time during a period of immensely formative change and growth, while considering our relationships with the evolving world around us. Within this framework, Time as a Sanctuary investigates notions of power structures, armor, home, separation, and awakening in reference to societal and personal issues directly connected to the human psyche and its (dis)connections to a grander sense of being.
With work produced over the last two and a half years, the exhibition explores the artist’s shifting journey of perception through a period that has seen our collective concept of time create echoes of change that we have only begun to digest. It is for the artist a visualization of the Sanctuary of Time, in which we find answers as well as questions, in which we have solace and a sense of place.
Arnold’s language moves from realism and symbolism in drawing wrought on paper, wood, and conceptually significant materials, to moments of deeply felt abstraction and expression. His works tell stories that exist not in one pathway of time, but in sudden leaps and intersections of time and space. The artist is working through intense spiritual and psychological shifts that play and move from moments of patient contemplation and meditation, to urgent realization and action.
A lineage of mythologies from the artist’s upbringing, ranging from images of medieval European armor to comic book appropriations, are utilized and presented in a process of critically deconstructing whiteness, patriarchal masculinity and toxicity, and militarized colonial systems of power. The installation work within the exhibition is the first of Arnold’s since 2016. Utilizing found materials, taxidermy, objects of ritual and relic, and various flora, the artist intends to address humanity’s reliance on nature, and raise questions of our adaptability to the existential threat of ecological change brought on by the climate crisis.
