In the abstract: Taos exhibit features over 60 artists working across multiple approaches and specialities

Apr. 7—The Taos Abstract Artist Collective's second exhibition lured so many applicants that the group divided it in two.

The first show opened in October; the second opens on Friday, April 12, in the Stables Gallery at the Taos Center for the Arts and closes on April 20.

"It more than doubled our inaugural show" in 2022, said Lauren Dana Smith, collective co-founder.

The spring exhibition features 64 abstract artists working across multiple approaches and specialities.

"I noticed we had more three-dimensional work, more new media and more experimental work," Smith said.

The spring crop also includes video, textiles and mixed-media, she said.

"This year we had a lot of ceramic work," Smith added.

Questa artist Peggy Trigg's "Topping" reveals her playful side with its scribbles and forms.

"Her work is so abstracted with her color choices," Smith said. "I'm struck by the emotion and juxtaposition of them. She also does landscape work."

"Playing with art materials has been my life's passion," Trigg wrote in her artist's statement. "Creating for myself or helping others to be creative has been my history.

"When in the studio, my love of abstraction takes hold and what results is more about design than anything else," Trigg continued. "Just 'making stuff' is my idea of living my best life."

Las Vegas, New Mexico, artist Henri Preiss created his relief out of cardboard and paper in "Visual aid for a traveling mind I."

"He's lived abroad; he talks about the Bauhaus (the legendary German art school shuttered by Adolf Hitler), Russia; he's lived in London," Smith said. "His background is in stage design."

Its geometric forms offer a panoply of viewing entry points.

Preiss wrote in his statement: "The desert areas of the Western U.S. had given me a new outlook at how to combine landscapes and visual communication symbols of many cultures to a universal language of geometric shapes and color."

Taos technical artist Michael Forte created an abstracted digital print titled "Flow 661." He began working digitally in 2000.

"That's a shift we're seeing more and more," Smith said. "It's a print of his digital painting. What I was struck by was the atmosphere in this piece. He gets a lot of texture. He also reveals a depth of emotion; he's very painterly."

Forte wrote: "These art works are different from the digital art that is usually seen, in that my images are based on the esthetics of traditional art media, but expand the visual possibilities far beyond the capabilities of traditional art" practices.

Albuquerque's Robyn Frank is a full-time studio artist who showed her work in the collective's inaugural exhibition. Her "Look/ see 02" consists of acrylic paint on Baltic birch panel.

The modular shapes almost appear as separate panels. She describes her work as a celebration of change.

"She has many layers of paint and hand sanding," Smith said. "She creates an almost perfect gradient with her work."

Frank wrote in her statement: "Repeating or reflecting shapes represent the duality of self — the innate up and down of all things — or to symbolize change across time or context."

Also from Albuquerque, Anna Rotty recently completed her Master of Fine Arts at the University of New Mexico. Her piece "Oasis (for Emma)" consists of a hand built wooden frame, a photograph on transparency film and acrylic.

The frame juts out cantilevered from the wall. Light reflects through it and casts a projection, producing the illusion of looking up from beneath the surface of reflecting water.

Rotty wrote: "Last summer, the Rio Grande dried up in Albuquerque for the first time since the 1980s. I think about what a river is without water. I think about the forms images take and how they change with their environment."

This summer, TAAC and the Couse-Sharp Historic Site will co-produce an exhibition with co-curators/jurors Alexandra Terry, curator of contemporary art at the New Mexico Museum of Art Vladem Contemporary, and Davison Packard Koenig, executive director of the Couse-Sharp Historic Site.