Curated by Tamara White
What if an ending is where everything begins?
Explore art shaped by memory, loss, reflection, and transformation.
A beginning isn't always a fresh start. Sometimes it grows out of grief, an unexpected discovery, or something that has been broken and remade.
In Beginnings, artists Ivan Bridges, Robert Hightower, and Derrick Schmidt explore transformation through images, memory, and materials. Their work invites us to consider what changes when we look again, make something new, or learn to carry what came before.
Ivan Bridges begins with appropriated images, not for reproduction but to transform them while inviting the viewer to imagine the possibilities. Robert Hightower provides us with the poetic beauty within the duality of grieving and waiting for new beginnings. Derrick Schmidt’s work gives a second life to broken and discarded elements, integrating them into layered compositions. Past memories and broken mirrors invite the viewer to see oneself in the work, allowing for the beginning of reflection, awareness, and transformation.
Selected works from our permanent collection extend that conversation, offering different perspectives on identity, reflection, and becoming. Artwork from our permanent collection by Michelle Doll, Rafa Esparza, Clifford Prince King, Magdalena Wosinska, and Lyne Lapointe is included in the exhibition.
Robert Hightower - The Weight of Waiting
There's a seat here that used to know your weight.
I don't forget shapes like that, even after they stop coming back.
For a while I just held the space where you were.
Didn't move, didn't ask for anything,
just kept the shape of you a little longer than I should have.
Then the flowers came in anyway.
Nobody asked them to.
They just grew right up against me
like they didn't know grief was supposed to keep its distance.
I used to think if I stayed still enough, you'd find your way back to me.
Now I think staying still was never the same as waiting.
Somebody new will sit here eventually.
They won't know what I used to hold,
they'll just feel the sun and the color coming up around them,
and that'll be enough.
I'm learning that new beginnings don't erase what came before.
They just grow right up next to it, uninvited, persistent, alive.
I'm not empty.
I'm becoming something that can hold two things at once.
Ivan Bridges
Beginnings is an apt title for this body of work by Ivan Bridges, as these paintings are concerned with something just emerging. They begin with appropriated source images, but their aim is not reproduction. Through the act of painting, each image is transformed into something new.
This transformation takes place in the application of paint itself. With deliberate restraint, Bridges leaves “just enough” on the surface for the image to remain unresolved rather than fully described. The viewer is invited to complete what is only partially revealed, participating in the image’s emergence. In this sense, the act of looking becomes inseparable from the work’s beginning.
Contact Ivan for availability and pricing.
Derrick Schmidt
Ideas emerge from the materials for artist Derrick Schmidt. Using layered surfaces and inviting past events, Schmidt utilizes broken mirrors and fragmented images to create moments of self-confrontation. Seeing oneself in the work elicits a beginning of possibilities. An act of reflection, awareness, and transformation. For the artist, the art is about freedom, freeing ourselves from our own barriers while looking at our life through mirror shards and memories.
From The Permanent Collection
