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Sat., June 7, 3-7 pm for Easthampton Art Walk

Sat., June 14, 12-5 pm for Cultural Chaos Street Festival

On Peripheral Visions: 

Priya N. Green and Andrae Green

Priya N. Green and Andrae Green’s art making practices share several common elements. They both paint - in vibrant brushy color. They both work figuratively - they paint things. And they both filter their choices of subject through different types of mediation. This mediation is, in one sense, distance. And fittingly, it is from a distance that their paintings appear clearest. Up close, they dissolve into abstraction. A face made by a single deftly placed daub of color becomes brush strokes or a color field; pure paint. But step back, first a few feet, then farther, perhaps even all the way across the room, and the colors and marks resolve into their subjects: flowers, crowds of people, lush landscapes, plumes of smoke.

Andrae Green’s manner of mediation is memory. Memory is a tricky thing. It links the past and present but these links can be tenuous or misleading. We can misremember, invent memories for ourselves, or forget memories entirely. Memories can be prompted by a sound, a voice, a smell, or an event. They spring to mind. In Andrae’s paintings, this spring is literal. His Divers series delves into his memories of times at the Kingston pier with his family as a child, watching other boys leap into the Caribbean Sea. Through the haze of bright colorful brush strokes, smears and scrapes, time and distance, he depicts bodies in motion. Either rising or falling (though the title of the series obviously tips us off), Andrae’s figures are, for at least this short moment when they arc in triplicate through the air, shown in a space of possibility between sea and sky. Mediated by memory but rooted in the present, these paintings exist between the two. Similarly betwixt are his small quick paintings, or what he calls roadside miniatures, of weeds and ruderal plants springing up from cracks in a sidewalk or along busy roads. Flowers that find ways to bloom in what would seem to be inhospitable places; a leap of another scale.

If Andrae Green’s Divers spring from memories, Priya N. Green’s paintings are mediated by screens and the sensory overload and white noise they can induce. She began exploring these themes using a visual language of abstraction and intentionally blinding neon colors in 2020, when protests of many different kinds inundated the mediascape. In the United States, people protested state-sanctioned violence and murder, objected to COVID-19 restrictions, and asserted political grievances, culminating with the attack on the U.S. Capitol in early 2021. During this same period in India, over 500,000 farmers gathered to protest new laws in what was perhaps the largest protest in history. Priya consumed all of these through the internet, a “place” where images of these protests were deployed in multiple ways. They circulated both as reportage and as misinformation. Images of one protest were recaptioned to suggest they were from another in an attempt to win the battle of political one upmanship that permeates social media. The slipperiness of this visual signifier caught Priya’s attention and she began painting the protests without context. A key question for her became: how does one respond to the inundation in volume and speed of these digitally circulated images? Her oil paintings—a medium that is slow and produces singular objects that cannot be everywhere all at once—show groups of people in motion as they blend into or emerge from the background. For Priya, the geographical distance between her and these massive protests in India feels particularly pronounced. She recounts seeing images of the protests and wanting to feel some connection to this place to which her family traces its origins. But a sense of distance remained.

In Italo Calvino’s 1972 novel, Invisible Cities, he writes of “a moment in life when [...] the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints old forms.” And later: “if I turned my gaze just a little toward the crowd [...] I was assailed by unexpected faces, reappearing from far away, staring at me as if demanding recognition.” Priya N. Green’s and Andrae Green’s paintings seem to search for recognition amongst these crowds or crowded memories and cracked sidewalks. But in the end, they meld into hazy fields of paint and color, more elusive with each step closer.

M.C. + E.C.

Easthampton, MA

May 17, 2025