APRÈS NOUS LE DÉLUGE
Hugh Atkins & Jenna Lucente

October 4 — October 28, 2017
Opening reception: October 4  |  5 - 9 PM, during Art Loop

Hugh Atkins, a presentation
Some pages strewn on a table in the middle of a room are all that remain of “A Disquisition on the Birds” by the engineer, artist and public intellectual, Dzherny Rujjieff (1892-1940). This brew of ornithology, aeronautics, cultural commentary and aesthetic criticism was denounced as seditious by authorities, partially because sections were written in a seemingly impenetrable code. The manuscript was publicly destroyed, apart from the few pages preserved here, on the table, saved and hidden by Rujjieff’s admirers. These pages were later acquired under mysterious circumstances by Lettice Futcher-Thorentrappe (1925-2009) who embarked on her own Liber Vitae to chronicle the deterioration of the planet in the 20th century. Futcher- Thorentrappe may have found the key to Rujjieff’s codes and began to develop her own versions, also arousing the suspicions of the authorities. She was never able to complete her Liber Vitae and many pages have gone missing. Those that remain raise a number of questions: How does her work connect to Rujjieff’s? Why were the works so threatening to those in power? Are the recurring images and symbols parts of a coherent belief system? Only the viewer can connect the dots.

Hugh Atkins is a visual artist whose lyrical work yields compositions typically forming mélanges of human forms, landscape, and intricate borders.

Jenna Lucente, paintings
Lucente’s landscapes present a vision of a tainted environment, the effects of flooding and climate change, and our irreconcilable differences as we try to find our way.   Lost, flooded, and searching, these anonymous figures eerily meander through the waters, holding each other for support. They are everyone you know, they are no one you know.   We peer in at them, observing a stillness and simplicity that strips away all excess. A veil of color unifies and infiltrates each world, never letting us forget the new normal.

Jenna Lucente is an artist and educator currently living in Delaware. She recently completed a public art commission that includes 28 glass windows for the above-ground Arthur Kill train station in Staten Island, New York. 

Elizabeth Denison Hatch Gallery