Library Street Collective is pleased to present Echoes in Motion, an exhibition with Patrick Alston and Heather Day, opening on October 26, 2024. Echoes in Motion will be the first presentation dedicated to the two artists, and will showcase eight new paintings informed by the nuances of the natural world.

Alston’s mixed media paintings, characterized by layers of texture built up through gestural marks, investigate themes of identity, process, environment and color theory. Day’s works are similarly bold in their rich and varied hues, reflecting phenomenological experiences within her surrounding landscape. The abstract paintings presented in Echoes in Motion are exceedingly affected by the emotional and sensory impressions of the artists’ transitory environments—Alston’s studio based in Connecticut and Day’s in the Mojave Desert. The suburban area of New Haven County, where Alston moved in 2020 from the Bronx, offers a diverse landscape of wooded mountains, dense forests, and serene bodies of water that continuously shift according to the seasons. The California desert town of Joshua Tree where Day has lived since 2019, on the other hand, presents an arid expanse of sandy plains, rocky outcrops and desert flora, with a remoteness that yields otherworldly light patterns in the sky. “Sensory perception and memory plays a huge role in my work, taking in my environment and all of its textures and sounds and smells.” Day explains. “It’s not always necessarily how it looks, but it's also how it feels.” This sentiment holds true for Alston as well. Despite the differences between the artists’ bicoastal environments, the pair find that their similarities—the seclusion, the solitude, and the liberation that these elements provide both physically and mentally when it comes to creating—are the most prominent influences on their work.

As Alston and Day grow more attuned to the worlds around them,—whether sensing major climate shifts or noticing something as subtle as a leaf skimming the soil—their paintings take on increasingly figurative qualities, reflecting the physicality of the artists’ gesture-based creative processes. Paint is intuitively pushed and pulled across the surfaces, the canvases vessels for exploring the tension between raw, unfiltered energy and measured restraint. To Alston, his pieces represent figurative battlegrounds where the accumulation of rakish yet ultimately harmonious marks document his internal grapplings with the emotional ebbs and flows of everyday life and the psychological effects of current events. As he expresses, “I’m having stimulating feelings around how time plays into the works, and how my daily attitude towards the world changes the direction of the paintings.” Day likewise builds inventories of gestural forms that are taken apart, rearranged, and sewn back together in a concert of opposing forces and color fields. She notes that in doing this, she’s able to embed multiple meanings and bridge relationships between her past and present self. In recognizing their discernable parallels while celebrating the strength in their contrasts, Alston and Day use Echoes in Motion as a platform to engage in a greater dialog about mindfulness and interconnectivity.

Echoes in Motion with Patrick Alston and Heather Day will be on view at Library Street Collective from October 26 - December 21, 2024.