“TECHNICOLOR ARCHETYPE”: This all-Art Enables exhibition pulls from themes of two other concurrent exhibitions: Erik Holden’s “It Takes a Village” and Laura Grothaus and Shelley Picot’s “Green Archives.” “Technicolor Archetype,” asks viewers to contemplate its images as figures drawn from stories, myths, and our collective unconscious. Images include iconic characters from history and television alongside familiar flora and fauna – elements of nature we often enlist as symbols of human traits and concepts. More surreal creatures show themselves too: a mythical sea beast, an orange goblin, a group of dancing trees, and a scorpion made of human hair – perhaps escaping from a fable or a dream.

“GREEN ARCHIVES”: Laura Grothaus and Shelley Picot explore themes of nature and storytelling through sculpture, video, painting, and additional 2D works made in collaboration with Art Enables artists Mara Clawson, Egbert “Clem” Evans, Debora Green, Vanessa Monroe, Gary Murrell, and Imani Turner. The exhibition considers the natural world as an index of living symbols and archetypes human beings have used over and over throughout history to tell and retell the stories that define us. The small husks of nascent seeds, twining tendrils of growing plants, the presence of pollinators, and the bodies of dogs, bears, and other animals – these images feel ripe with mythic potential, an elemental vocabulary ready to be shaped into new narratives.

“IT TAKES A VILLAGE”:  Erik Holden’s paintings present collages of figuration, pairing subjects in the classical poses and draped fabrics of the Renaissance with the 2-dimensional, candy-coated bodies of cartoon characters.  The images seem in the middle of an ongoing cycle, their parts colliding in a space of reactivity and re-making.  Holden’s subjects clash in style, but they all play familiar roles: the king, the beauty, the witch, the beast, the goddess, the companion, the comic relief. In turns noble, goofy, saccharine, and iconic, they are timeless characters cast in the stories we employ to interpret our shared human experiences. Including works made in collaboration with Art Enables artists Maurice Barnes, Jay Bird, Duane Blacksheare-Staton, and Nonja Tiller.