I Am All the Loves I Have Ever Known

I Am All the Loves I Have Ever Known closes 2024 and opens 2025 with a contemplative gesture towards self-actualization and self-recognition in and through relationship with others and place. The exhibition centers ecology as a way of thinking, perceiving, relating, and understanding – tracing encounters and symbiotic relationships found in the natural environment within personal, interpersonal, and collective experiences. The curatorial concept was triggered by a title of one of Louise Mandumbwa’s works, "All the Loves I Have Known" (inspired in turn by a Toni Morrison quote, "I am all the things I have ever loved").

An ecological mindset considers intersections of structure and improvisation within continuous cycles and iterations of destruction, decomposition, repair, and renewal – the ways in which labor, love, and leisure are intertwined in our conceptions of caretaking, caregiving, work, and play. The literal and figurative borrowing from ecology encourages a close consideration of the smallest of elements in the grand scheme of things, the notes strung together in a melody, the banter between friends, the mulching of soil before planting, the underlayer or sketch marks beneath a painting, or the wire skeleton holding up a layered fibre body.

Louise Mandumbwa’s works in the exhibition are portraits of beloved friends and family members painted in oil but with the tenderness of a pencil or charcoal drawing, shown alongside a panel piece incorporating fragments of plant life, a nod to the gardens Mandumbwa recalls as home and featured in her poem "I am all the loves I have ever known." In the poem Mandumbwa speaks of her mother’s gardens – "That I remember the gardens she kept at each house we called home better than the rooms inside of them." The plants in the gardens and the gardens themselves not only form a part of home, but hold a space for a sensorial recollection, a memory of home that is both embodied and ephemeral.

The paintings by Nicolas Coleman center around music and summertime. The compositions all include figures in an interior space with a window looking out to a different landscape: mountains, gardens, and the blues of water and skies. These spaces and settings are all imagined but draw inspiration from Coleman’s recent travels across the United States and to the South of France. Mirroring the theme of music, the artist created compositions that are lyrical, bright, and expressive while simultaneously including elements of melancholy in the expressions of the figures. With the juxtaposition of interior and exterior, bright jovial colors, and the figures’ somber expressions, the music and dancing captured in the still images harken to the fragmented and yet inter-connected ways that we reconstruct our memories of the people, places, and things we have encountered.

In ecological considerations, human interactions and relationships occur in concert with (for better or worse) the broader natural environment, in body, in mind - embodied. There is a gentle invitation to understand human beings as being part of (not apart from) nature, embodied in it, and that nature is itself an unyielding force that has the capacity to engulf, consume, and regenerate itself. Nnenna Okore’s wall-engulfing installation When All Is Said and Done is made from burlap, dye, wire, and yarn and the work explores and utilizes the inherent physicality, durability, and apparent fragility and flexibility of burlap and wire. The textured sculpture sprouts from the walls like an organism growing outward to meet the space, inviting the viewer to contemplate the passing of time, through growth, death, decay, and re-growth – perhaps mimicking life forms drawn from the viewer’s own memories and imagination. The two-part sprawling piece comprises of billowing waves of stretched natural fibre layeres shaped on a black wire frame, with root-like forms of swooping and entangled threads in hues of red, dark purple, and brown.