Refrigerator Poetry

APRIL 2022 CATALOGUE

Cover: Hollis Hildebrand-Mills, Cone, 2022.

Refrigerator Poetry April 2022 features artwork completed within the last year by six national and international artists who broadly range in their formal approaches and in the memories they summon. Refrigerator Poetry Visual Art Archive can be defined as a multiplicity of voices each carrying a unique personal and social charge, intuitiveness, and emotional authenticity. As always, there was no jury process, and yet, the work gathers threads that connect landscape, history, myth, poetry, and the artist’s own lived experiences.

Vian Borchert continues to drive artistic inquiry into the rapidly changing environment and vulnerability of the landscape. “Green Form” is part of a series of works, a visual repetition of green gesture that evokes sounds and words to draw the mind inward, away from the contingencies of ordinary life.

Hollis Hildebrand-Mills’ imagery never settles – the recognizable form generates provocative contacts between our sense of the materiality of the art and our sense that the terrible comes without warning.

Rita Holcberg’s “Never Too Late for Roses 8” toggles between representation and abstraction. The turbulent movement of reds and greens brings our attention to a suspended shape caught in a moment of stillness.

Fascinated by the visceral palpability of being human, Perri Neri’s figurative work titled “Thread,” navigates psychological territories of identity – threading the past to the present.

Obilala Nwankwo paints with lyrically expressive joy and colorful complexity. “I Also Deserved Flowers” feels like an explosion of intimacy and connection and reminds us of the pleasure of voyeurism. The gap between image and narrative belies imagination.   

Mark T. Wright’s drawing speaks powerfully to the presence of absence. “Papa’s Shoes” holds a sentiment and feeling of anxiously waiting for someone to return– an implied desire to touch and reconnect.

Participating Artists: 
Vian Borchert, Hollis Hildebrand-Mills, Rita Holcberg, Perri Neri, Obilala Nwankwo, and Mark T. Wright.