Guided Meditation
Art and Wellness
Join us for a free, 30-minute weekly meditation led by local yoga teacher Aparna Sadananda via Zoom. Inspired by Bonnard’s Worlds, we will practice techniques for mindful looking and thinking that we can carry with us wherever we are. No prior experience needed.
Following the meditation, LA-based artist Whitney Bedford will give a talk about how Bonnard has influenced her art. In conversation with Elsa Smithgall, co-curator of Bonnard’s Worlds.
This free program requires registration. You will receive the invitation to the Zoom meeting in an email after you register.
Whitney Bedford, Veduta (Bonnard Summer), 2021, Ink and oil on linen on hybrid panel, 79 1/2 x 100 in.
About Whitney Bedford’s Veduta series
Continuing her exploration of the affective possibilities of historical landscapes, Vedute finds Whitney Bedford using scale and repetition to mine the experiential possibilities of painting the land in the twenty-first century. A monumental painting by Bonnard via Bedford is repeated four times. Each repetition refers to a time of day: mid-morning, mid-afternoon, evening. The passage of time is reflected in a shifting palette, the compositions and confrontations between present and past in each work changed only in their color. From a thicket of frenzied lines and a maelstrom of day-glo hues–as if she mixed her paints with irradiated waste, Bedford conjures haunting, post-pastoral landscapes. From this Chernobyl palette and these skittered marks emerges a lamentation on the loss of our earth, but also a calling out of the ancient pastoral tradition for perpetuating what was always a myth: that we, humans, have ever lived in anything like a balance or concordance with our surrounding world. With her helter-skelter Constables and gonzo Bonnards, Bedford critiques the greater landscape tradition while weaponizing it against our own impoverished reality. Each high-concept hallucination memorializes the parched and invalid land of our time. After all, what better way to satirize or own destruction than to grant it so much false nobility?—Matt Abrams, Notes on the Post-Pastoral Landscape
IMAGE: Pierre Bonnard, Southern Landscape with Two Children, 1916–18, Oil on canvas, 54 3/4 x 77 7/8 in., Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Gift of Sam and Ayala Zacks, 1970, Photo Courtesy of AGO, © 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
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