NASHVILLE, TENN.- “In my work, nature, landscape, the bright symbolic sunrise, the gloaming,
weather conditions, paint and color, become a stirred fiction.”

Anne Daigh Landscape Architect LLC’s Galerie Tangerine is pleased to open its fall season and to present Shaking the Twilight, an exhibition of new work by Corrine Colarusso. This showcase of paintings and drawings gives shape, body, and substance to the axial spectacle of day transforming into night.

On the heels of Nashville’s experience of the total eclipse, Colarusso’s work extends our appreciation of our moving world. Her paintings and drawings depict an intimate, yet epic narrative that describes the fleeting universe as light fades during this small, ephemeral sector of each day. She reminds us to pay attention as twilight falls like rain to create opportunities for events within the natural world and ourselves, saying:

“Each year as we approach the winter solstice, I try to make at least one painting about everyday twilight, in the world, in the back yard, and in us. 2016 was different. After the election, the idea of twilight seemed to carry a more structured, formidable, solid presence and no doubt, it has affected my work. I have concentrated my attention to that time of day, that time of year, on the ephemeral brief encounter of each day when we know we have marked time, when we move full-bodied into another universe of light, mood, spirit. On the shortest day of the year, we make the turn and head towards light. I hope we do this for ourselves and for our country.”

Her work concentrates our attention to what has been observed in the natural world; yet it is less about verisimilitude, and more about the experience of looking and being there. Her paintings merge the materiality of paint with illusion and abstraction.

“There is a metaphorical, fugitive quality to my work. It depicts not a comfortable nature, but a shifting one, acknowledging that we live in a time when technology seems increasingly natural to us and nature itself less so. And because of this, landscape, nature, and plant life, however beautiful and seemingly familiar, provide a speculative reality.“

Nevertheless, her paintings reinforce that nature makes us human. They depict landscapes as if they were arenas or stage sets where our experience unfolds. Nothing and everything -- light changes, breeze shifts, the sound of reeds and darting of flies -- happens.

As the autumnal equinox tilts us towards the gloaming and we become most aware of our need for light, Colarusso’s work helps us to appreciate and ponder the everyday spectacular, when matter becomes spirit.