UNSEEN ORDER

Excited to announce our upcoming exhibition, Unseen Order, with artwork by Bushra Gill, October 5 to December 1, 2024.

Flowers represent more than just extraordinary beauty, rather they symbolize an unseen order: a larger design that organizes life. Combining images with geometric patterns, I reveal, conceal and remake both towards an overall invisible structure. 

I am interested in how we sense and connect to that unseen order by suggesting a visible possibility. The tiny shapes combine to make a pattern but each one can shift the whole image. The repetition of shapes on the surface creates a rhythm that moves our eyes across the image, and the breaks in the pattern point to our imperfections. Through this process, I found that those imperfections became the most interesting aspect and actively followed the patterns as they began to morph and move, not held to the flatness of paper.

In this exhibition of new work from the past year, much of it from several printmaking residencies, I began with tree imagery, comparing the changing light of day with seasons of life, which turned into an exploration of invisible structures linking the trees with life itself. As the world’s events became bleaker, black made an unexpected appearance, slowly at first, then grew to fill the richly embossed surfaces of my prints in wide swaths. Spring brought banks of poppies shoving their way in along the edges of parking lots and roads, and their orange insistence was a reminder to me of a larger system. A chance glimpse of morning glories racing over chain link fences and rusting car skeletons gave me another gift of unexpected beauty and reaffirmed my awareness of an unseen order.

Artist Bio

Emigrating at a young age, I had always felt a part of things but was actually apart from most everything.  So in my work, I think about connection, especially an underlying structure of everything around us that unites us to each other and to nature, time and space.

Inspired by Islamic geometric patterns, I tessellate images from everyday life to create rich and complex surfaces. In the process, dimensions of my subjects are simultaneously revealed and concealed, enabling me to explore the concept of things that are both present and veiled –  like my hair, which I cover with a scarf in public. Using repeated geometric shapes that fit closely together creates a sense of order through which I understand the natural world and my personal experience. Rather than constraining my freedom, this approach provides a scaffold for experimenting with color, texture, and spatial possibilities.