Milk Tide: Christy Matson & Amanda Valdez at Reynolds Gallery
Reynolds Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Milk Tide, a two-person exhibition, with works by Christy Matson & Amanda Valdez. The exhibition opens on Friday, March 21, 2025 at our Main Street location with a public reception from 5 – 7 pm. The show runs through May 23.
For this dual show, Matson and Valdez present Milk Tide, an exhibition of mixed media paintings that explore the history and memories the body holds and their deep connection to the land they grew up on. While the works do not depict direct references to specific landmarks, the iconography of landscapes becomes evident through the layering and rounding of shapes within the work. The artists’ unique interpretations of the world emulate the softness of memories and their evolution as the mind attempts to preserve them. Both artists deviate from traditional painting methods, creating eye catching texture and patterns through the use of weaving and textiles. Their methods and intentions come together seamlessly to bring this show to life.
An essay by Shannon R. Stratton, Chicago, IL
‘Do you ever experience, startled, the feeling of familiarity in places you have actually never been before, but realize slowly it is because the slope of the ground and the smell of the air resemble your mother-land? There is a character that is the same, and as it gains focus, you begin to see how the color of this dirt reminds you of home and so you find yourself for a moment held by the landscape that is tethering your inside to what is out.’
‘Christy Matson and Amanda Valdez both live with the Pacific Northwest inside them; their motherlands. Exhibiting together for Milk Tide, their woven and mixed media pictures of rounded mounds and slopes and arches, provide both the landscape (Matson) and portrait (Valdez) orientation of landscapes by feel. There are no referential images that one can point to and say: “Mt. Rainier!,” rather one gets the impression of place and how it becomes re-rendered in the imagination over time. The act of remembering always brings forth and changes the recollection before being stored back in the catalog of memories, melting them down over time into wisps and veils that become less and less like pictures. Matson and Valdez show us the sensation of those memories; something only art is capable of.’
‘Matson and Valdez’s Milk Tide gathers us into the shapes and color and weather and light that live inside of us, often living on as navigational tools. I find my way home via the black granite stark cold and bright peak that stays on inside of my heart. That sharp shape means “mountain,” the idea of a mountain that is the idea of home; and always the idea of me.’
