No Horizon: Helen Mirra and Sean Thackrey

This exhibition brings together two artists whose work embraces the simple act of seeing as an inspiration to deep reflection and understanding. Helen Mirra and Sean Thackrey both have had longstanding engagements with Zen, and their approaches to art reflect the discipline of simplicity and the recognition of the sublime as bare experience. Mirra’s recent art practice is shown in woven wall pieces that capture the nuances of her somatic experience (breathing, standing, sensing) and the conditions of the geography she encounters and moves through (air, ground, sky). Each small-scale weaving presents a rich and restrained irregular grid of drifting color, shape, and texture. Thackrey’s photographs, which are mounted on specially dyed wood panels, are images of walls in Venice, Italy. His close-up compositions reveal the infinitely varied and remarkably expressive details of these weathered slabs of stone. In Thackrey’s photographs we encounter the simultaneous expression of the particular and the universal. Both artists live in West Marin County, just north of San Francisco.