Hey, blog post number four! Look at me go here. I’m totally not that person who started a LiveJournal and only made three posts, because now I’ve made four.
I’m very happy this week to invite you to my upcoming exhibition, A Map & A Key, and give a few details about it. It will take place at Boxheart Gallery from March 3 through April 2 of this year. Due to the pandemic conditions, there will not be an opening event for this show, but the gallery will still be open for in-person visits! Masks are required of course, and there is plenty of room in the gallery to be socially distanced while you view the artwork, so I am hoping that you, my friend, will be able to stop by. If you want to be extra safe, you’re even able to book a free private appointment right on their website.
If you haven’t been to Boxheart before, you’re in for a treat. It’s a super awesome gallery that features really interesting and thought-provoking work. They exhibit many emerging artists (like me) and mixed media artists (also like me) and I’m honored to be a part of their artist family.
To describe my show, I’ll start with the blurb that is included in the press release and promotional materials, because I think it describes the intent of the collection pretty nicely:
In A Map & A Key, Cavalline offers a fragmented landscape of lost adventure and faint longing, pieced together from boyish ideas of an arcane and extraordinary world, softened and worn by years of misremembering. Using a rich combination of expressive mark-making, textural painting, and idiosyncratic collage, his compositions seek to capture memory as a moving cascade of fiction and recollection. Embedded with insignia that hint at the esoteric symbols of a forgotten culture, A Map & A Key recalls a sensitive boy’s pure and desperate creation of a personal mythology and speaks to a quiet and insistent longing for magic amid the devastating loss that comes with growing up.
So, to build off of that very swanky and impressive mass of art-speak, this is a collection about adventure. About things that are secret and special. Quests. It’s about maps, magic, hidden doors. You know, that kind of thing.
As I’ve mentioned previously in a blog post, describing my artwork doesn’t always come easily to me. And it’s even a little tougher for this exhibition, because this artwork is about stories you figure out as you go along. Symbols and histories that no one else knows. Treasures that you don’t understand, yet. Things that are found, and then forgotten, and then remembered.
It’s about the lost languages and secret lore of a kid who climbed a tree and made a kingdom there.
If you’re someone who ever found an old key right where an old key had no place to be, and put it in your pocket, and carried it around, because it could’ve been left there just for you, and there might be a door somewhere, that you’ll probably find someday, and that door could very well be magic… then I have a story to tell you. And if you never did anything along those lines… well, I guess I have a hard time believing that. But you should come along too.
I’m really excited to share this work. I’ll be showing thirty new mixed media panels, and I will also be introducing a new series of hand-detailed monoprints.
I really hope you can come and see! If you want to, please sign up for email updates (at the very bottom of this page) and follow me on Instagram (@t.cavalline).
I’ll be posting more details in the weeks to come... including a quite adventurous giveaway.
