OCHI is pleased to participate in Intersect Aspen to take place August 1 through 4, 2023 at the Aspen Ice Garden in Aspen, Colorado. A group presentation of new and recent works by Adam Beris, James Chronister, Cooper Cox, Velia De Iuliis, Devin Farrand, Emily Harter, and Aaron Michael Skolnick offers multivalent perspectives on artistic engagement with nature. From neighborhood walks during studio breaks, to the landscape filtered through allegorical animation, to fresh takes on landscape painting, to concerns over climate change, conservation, and natural healing potentials—these artists represent a breadth of contemporary practices served au naturale.

Adam Beris (b. 1987, Milwaukee, WI) makes paintings that celebrate and challenge traditional relationships between object, subject, foreground, and background. Beris’ primary action in the studio is squeezing paint from tubes. Deftly extruding streams of unadulterated color into an array of symbols, characters, food, ideas, and abstractions, Beris has created an ever-expanding lexicon of pictographs that are informed by the shapes of language, infographics, and the pervasive influence of social media. Aligned in grids, Beris’ glyphs function like a lost codec of a childhood dream, but tangled amongst the blades of extruded paint grass, they resemble the refuse of a careless and anthropocentric society—and to prove his point Beris embeds litter from walks in his neighborhood in between painting sessions.

 In his paintings, James Chronister (b. 1978, Helena, MT) has produced a visual language that oscillates between personal and universal ideas of landscape and place. Based on his own photographs of his native state of Montana, Chronister renders images using thinned black oil paint on a white or neutral-colored ground, conveying space and depth utilizing mark-making akin to an intaglio print. In these recent works, the white ground becomes highlights, the opaque passages become shadows and cross-hatching become mid-tones. Unassuming but vastly complex in their subtlety, these scenes of nature depict an unseen environment that is both rich and rewarding of investigation.

Cooper Cox (b.1978, Sun Valley, ID) is known for his elaborate oil painting techniques that create sculptural surfaces. With a background in design, Cox finds himself drawn especially to texture. Exploring the rich detail and layering of oil allows him simultaneous creation of crispness and rejection of the static. Cox depicts a reality just palpable enough for us to relate, while his abstractness invites viewers to reshape notions of perception. Themes of love and loss echo throughout his work, and the changing natural environment provides constant inspiration for both narratives.

With a steadfast commitment to observing and documenting the natural world, Velia De Iuliis (b.1990, New York, NY) makes rich and highly detailed paintings that embrace the dynamic manifestations of myriad living species. Freely mixing categories of floral subjects—thriving and endangered, uncommon and familiar, tropical and temperate—De Iuliis’ paintings celebrate the sublime existence and fleeting temporality of each plant. Building still life montages on abstract backdrops, De Iuliis delicately entwines and poses each petal, leaf, and stem, as she meditates on the complex relationships between humans and their ecosystems. Disenchanted by an overwhelming reliance on the pharmaceutical industry in treating and managing ailments as well as the environmental impacts of such global behemoths, De Iuliis shifted focus to natural remedies, herbalism, and alternative therapies. Contemplating interior plant properties helped to develop De Iuliis’ fascination with the visual intricacies, patterns, colors, and forms found in individual specimens, carefully replicating them to capture their fleeting beauty. In the spirit of botanical illustration, De Iuliis proffers a world of mysterious, whimsical, and rare plants that few will have the pleasure to see in their natural habitats.

Devin Farrand (b.1986, Salem, Oregon) was raised in a family of builders. Growing up in rural Oregon, he quickly became part of a tradition rooted in generations of exploring craftsmanship and manufacturing. Farrand’s puff paintings have emerged from his interest in marble as a sculptural material, as a natural resource, and as a signifier of permanence and societal authority. In the gridded landscape of the quarry created over thousands of years of marble extraction, Farrand found visual resonance with the seams of a downed jacket. The wrinkles in a painting of a puff jacket conjure the fleshy muscles of Greco-Roman gods draped in robes all exquisitely chiseled from a single block of marble—in fact Farrand often sources marble from the Carrara quarry that birthed such masterpieces from centuries ago. Farrand creates closely cropped compositions absent of sleeves, zippers, or bodily form, transforming a pervasive cultural object into abstraction. Soft light falls on the crests of creases in contrast with painted threads found in the shadow of a seam—there is romance in Farrand’s observations.

Channeling the visual lexicons of 16^th century Flemish tapestries, antique store kitsch, and satirical turn-of-the-century prints, Emily Harter (b. 1997, Baltimore, MD) creates visual dramas exploding with narratives of longing and desire. Casting an ensemble of unidentified reoccurring characters, figures drift across the canvas, tangled and twisted in moments of intense action or dramatic repose. Voyeuristic, comical, and hypnotizingly nostalgic, each work theatrically presents its multiple performances—a never ending grand opera. Swirling landscapes of brown and blue hills invoke a surreal, dreamlike quality to the images, presenting the viewer with worlds subdued in calm and chaos. Despite their stoic classicism each character seems active in their own misfortune—guns misfire, characters become tangled, horses are ridden backwards, and ropes fray at their centers—and all attempts at regaining control are thwarted. Multiple narratives commingle on the same plane, allowing the canvas to be understood from multiple points of entry. Harter provides a framework to reimagine traditional masculinity and the cruel optimism of desire—the passion of wanting that which is tragically out of reach.

Aaron Michael Skolnick (b. 1989, Erlanger, KY) creates representations of nature that are peaceful, sublime, and at times melancholic, as he captures the ever-changing light flickering through leaves or reflecting off the sea. Channeling the slowness of an afternoon or the speed of a sunset into wet-on-wet strokes of color, Skolnick seeks and finds self-reflection in his surroundings and in their re-creations. Painting en plein air with focus, patience, and a reliance on memory—each of Skolnick’s works becomes a remnant of a fleeting interaction between the earth, a flower, a deer, a field, the sun, and the artist. Scale-shifting with aplomb, Skolnick glances towards an expansive universe as he pushes up against the confines of the canvas, creating hazy meditations on the presence of being. Skolnick strikes moments of connection through universal relevance, making space for the viewer to reflect on each visceral instances in time. Skolnick’s paintings are vessels to capture moments, feelings, and gestures, successfully subverting the enormity of the present.