Chilean artist Alonsa Guevara’s upcoming solo exhibition at Anna Zorina Gallery in New York City, titled “Ceremonies,” honors life’s varying stages with renderings of “imaginary rites.” Humans, harvests, and lands are among those celebrated in the exhibition, as a collection of oil paintings on canvas. The show runs Sept. 1 through Oct. 1.
Guevara hails from Rancagua, Chile, where she spent a 7-year stretch of her life in an Ecuadorian tropical forest. This backdrop sparked her love of flora, fauna, light, and colors. A release explains her current exploration of nature’s themes: “In the life-sized Ceremony portraits, unclothed bodies become one with the soil while covered with a mix of fruits, vegetables and flowers as a connection with earthly gifts. By incorporating fresh and vibrant, rotten and blemished produce, the work represents the full cycle of life, making fertility and fecundity coexist in a parallel with decay and death.”
The elevated, ominscient viewpoint of the audience is intended to make the viewer a “recipient of the rituals.” It is up to us, as viewers, to both receive and make sense of the rituals created at the hands of Guevara. The style of the paintings also hints at the cyclical nature of art, with visual allusions to the Dutch Golden Age and other eras.
In conjunction with "Turn the Page: The First Ten Years of Hi-Fructose" at Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, painter 
Sarah Ball's oil paintings, subtle in their complexity, are intended for the viewer to encounter the portrait's subject intimately. The practice of physiognomy, or judging the character of a person just from their facial features or expressions, has long been a subject of fascination for the artist. In efforts like her current Anima Mundi show "Themself," she culls her subjects from historic photographic archives, social media, and beyond. "These source images become a starting point for a methodical process of understanding, assumption and translation, where the aesthetic ‘mask' and what lies beneath become the focus of engagement,” the gallery says.