I find exhibitions with a tangible, strong personal narrative woven into them to be some of the most powerful, as the story behind these shows reaches you before you try to deconstruct them. Or at least, that's what I felt upon staring at the co-authored works of Shaan Bevan and Owen Pratt, on display through November 9 at Palmer Gallery as part of their joint presentation, Ex-Voto. Borrowing its title "from ancient offerings used by various communities throughout human history, primarily intended to ward off illness and danger", the exhibition is a poetic tale of sickness and recovery and the state of limbo interposing the two. After being diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma in her mid-twenties, Bevan turned to art to process her experiences of treatment and healing, finding in it the ideal platform onto which to project her impressions of the cyclicality of life and the recurring states of "generation and decay" that define its pace.
As she experimented with this new approach to creating, the artist embraced her mixed-media oeuvre — integrating different metals and synthetic materials as well as drawing in bi-dimensional, canvas-like pieces — to manifest the continuum between the human and the natural world. After her condition began to improve, Bevan moved to southern France from the US alongside her partner, Pratt, where she became fascinated with the morphology of the place, particularly with a local rock quarry once used for lithography. Chasing that creative awakening, in Ex-Voto, the artist depicts the human form "as a rock quarry (as well as other natural landscapes), where bodily systems are examined alongside organic processes of deposition, transformation, and extraction". Drawing on a universal understanding of "living entities and material animism", the showcase highlights the regenerative power of nature, sewing the gap between living and nonliving, and celebrating life in its eternal metamorphosis.
