Reynolds Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Resonance, a solo exhibition of paintings by Laura Snyder. The exhibition opens on Friday, September 6, 2024 at our Main Street location with a public reception from 5 – 7 pm. Snyder will give an artist talk on Saturday, September 7 at 11 am. The show runs through October 25.
For her first solo exhibition at Reynolds Gallery, Snyder presents Resonance, a collection of works on panel and paper that depict a wave that is constantly ebbing and flowing. Her delicate line work and natural color palette give each piece a relaxed and soothing motion. Snyder portrays both the calm and leisurely frequencies of our minds, and the abrupt and attentive. The resulting artwork quite literally vibrates before your eyes. The back and forth linework echoes Snyder’s own life, where her lifestyle is split between her hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia and coastal Mexico. Resonance provides an overall immersive encounter that invites the viewer to experience sound and senses visually.
A word from the Artist
In this body of work, comprised of paintings and works on paper, visual resonance is coaxed out of form and pictorial space.
Fields of lines in watercolor flowing and snaking through a grid drawn on a gesso surface or smooth paper are punctuated by still points, which hold the pictorial space and provide anchors for rapt attention. Colors in the works sing in harmony or in tension, while positive and negative space vacillate in the picture plane, much like a jump rope whose rhythm we must feel in our bodies before we jump in.
Visually speaking, resonance is composed of waves that are symmetrical and balanced, is about matching and fitting, and is a precise thing that naturally occurs all the time, like magnetism.
Through our senses our bodies, like instruments, can resonate with our surroundings and with the natural world. We recognize the scent of rain falling on dry ground and give it a name, petrichor, a mixture of chemicals, bacteria, and volatile oils released by plants. We have evolved to recognize and even delight in the scent and the promise it offers. We may breathe in deeply, our shoulders may relax, we may look to the sky.
Through my use of color, form, and mark making, I seek natural frequencies in the mind that are slow, and peaceful, like the cool interior of a chapel amidst of the hot bustle of a city street, and the frequencies of rapt attention which seem to arrest time. These states of mind are often elusive within the chaos of daily life. The paintings are meant to resonate with those parts of our minds.
I have spent the past two decades moving from place to place, but in recent years the movement has settled into a back and forth, a vaivén between a small coastal town in Mexico and my birthplace in Virginia. Moving between places, one comes to realize that what is valued looks different in different cultures. Utopia looks different to different people. These shifts of perspective cause me to question my own value systems and above all, to value the shifts of perspective themselves, the reminders that everything we assume to be status quo is a construct. I don’t know whether I will move forever back and forth between places, mentally if not physically, through longing and the reach of memory and images, or if I will find some sort of balance that unifies past and present, distinct places and selves, a resonance of sorts. A life lived with rapt attention.
About the Artist
Laura Josephine Snyder (Charlottesville, VA) explores cognition, emotion and memory through visual abstraction. Her work enquiries into the ways in which the signs and symbols found in our physical environment influence the movements of our minds and bodies. She has shown her work nationally and internationally, including in Mexico City, Mexico, Bogotá, Colombia, Saint Petersburg, Florida, and Richmond, Virginia. She has an MFA from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and a BFA in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design. Snyder has shown in many solo and group exhibitions at Studio IX, Charlottesville, Virginia (2021, 2023), Second Street Gallery, Charlottesville, Virginia (2020, 2022, 2024), Tyger Tyger Gallery, Asheville, North Carolina (2024) to name a few.
