Cheryl Warrick: Invitation Inside

May 2 - 31 at Gallery NAGA

Based in Boston, the painter Cheryl Warrick has developed an exhibition career throughout the United States that since the mid-1990s has presented her ongoing Wisdom Series, a succession of paintings through which she seeks to provoke her viewers to examine how they know what they know.  Using as components rudimentary language, symbols, and such visual archetypes as receding landscapes, the paintings stimulate reflection on how we synthesize experience and meaning.

Invitation Inside, an exhibition of 16 new Wisdom Series paintings, opens on Friday, May 2 with a reception for the artist and the public from 6 to 8 pm.  The show, which runs through May 31, is accompanied by a catalog with an essay by Joyce Cohen, lecturer in art history at Simmons College.

Cohen writes, “By presenting a virtual catalog of systems for organizing meaning, the artist invites viewers to join an epistemological conversation.  She shows us mathematical formulas, columns of numbers, and sentence diagrams.  Game boards, charts, and word puzzles also emerge from within densely painted surfaces.  Warrick’s quest is a gentle but persistent exploration of the many ways personal knowledge is constructed, how we each come to know what it is we know.”

The current work is an advance for Warrick in the sheer number of visual elements incorporated, thickly packed and overlapping, setting off ricochets of associations. 

Asked if she agrees this is her densest work, Warrick laughs and says, “I did throw in the kitchen sink.  For me it was about a fearlessness.  Sometimes it’s all there, and you just have to be with it.  You wouldn’t ask a forest to stop being a forest.”