Ebb & Flow
April 1 - April 21, 2023 | Reception: April 6, 2023, 6-8 PM
View CatalogAgora Gallery is pleased to announce Ebb & Flow, a group exhibition of paintings and photographs that illustrate the inherent transience and inconstancy of our existence. The first dharma seal in Buddhism posits that all that appears on the material plane has a beginning, middle, and end. Presocratic philosopher Heraclitus distilled this concept in his well-known aphorism Panta Rei (everything flows). "All things come into being by conflict of opposites, and the sum of things flows like a stream,” he wrote. The Indian scriptures say as much. Whether we like it or not, all realities in the phenomenal world are in a constant state of transformation, even those who seem the most solid and permanent. The artists in this exhibition explore temporal and spatial passages through the use of color, shapes, and linework. Polygons shatter, intersect, rearrange, molding into infinite iterations of form. Longilinear paint strokes travel like rivers outside the canvas into infinity. Movement is found in the hurried traveler at a train station, in a woman’s quest for freedom on a fantastical island, in the subtle imperfections of a rock. As unsettling as change appears, it need not be that scary. Riding graciously through the tidal waves of life, we revel in the comforting truth that “this too shall pass.”