Sheryl Haler: Back to the Garden

JANUARY 11 – FEBRUARY 12, 2021

PROJECT SPACE 340 located in the Arcos Building, 340 Central Ave.

Through the lens of now, going Back to the Garden is reconnecting with nature, with culture, with religion, with science, with myth, with history, with knowledge, with the origin of our true self and our better angels.

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Nature, myth, place and relationship are recurrent themes in my work.  These stories are timeless and time sensitive.

The relationship of the human, animals, the objects, the materials and the settings are designed to promote more than a dialogue between the art and the viewer. I want to motivate the viewer to ask their own questions about the contradictions of human beliefs and practices, i.e., we embrace progress but dislike change, we seek the fulfillment of the spiritual by accumulating the material, we are drawn to that which is wild or different only to tame or diminish it as quickly as possible. My hope is that my work asks us all to be attuned to the choices we make and whether or not we truly consider the options before we act.

My primary media is cloth because it is a wondrous mixture of history and technology, nature and human hand, as well as the symbolic and the utilitarian. My art grows from family traditions. My grandmother gave us special gifts wrapped in handkerchiefs. My daughter used bandanas to keep things safe. I use these materials and processes to make associations to cultures, to civilizations, to environments, to customs. I work with repetitive/meditative processes — touching, combining, knotting, binding, stitching — to make a whole from fragments. This is an important, inseparable part of my personal role as both a woman and an artist.