“My tears are like the quiet drift

Of petals from some magic rose;

And all my grief flows from the rift

Of unremembered skies and snows.

I think, that if I touched the earth,

It would crumble;

It is so sad and beautiful,

So tremulously like a dream.”

- Dylan Thomas, Clown in the Moon, 1929

“There is an old saying that God is a circle whose centre is everywhere. If that is true, the saint goes to the centre, the poet and artist to the ring where everything comes round again. The poet must not seek for what is still and fixed, for that has no life for him; and if he did, his style would become cold and monotonous, and his sense of beauty faint and sickly, as are both style and beauty to my imagination in the prose and poetry of Newman, but be content to find his pleasure in all that is forever passing away that it may come again, in the beauty of woman, in the fragile flowers of spring, in momentary heroic passion, in whatever is most fleeting, most impassioned, as it were, for its own perfection, most eager to return in its glory. Yet perhaps he must endure the impermanent a little, for these things return, but not wholly, for no two faces are alike, and, it may be, had we more learned eyes, no two flowers. Is it that all things are made by the struggle of the individual and the world, of the unchanging and the returning, and that the saint and the poet are over all, and that the poet has made his home in the Serpent’s mouth?” - W.B. Yeats, In the Serpent’s Mouth

Stellarhighway is pleased to present the rift and the ring, a solo show of new work by Meris Drew (b. 1995, Ft. Lauderdale, FL). Drew’s practice is an inquiry into how the earth appears, the potential that lies within it, what it means and what we will make of it. The paintings, like the swampy Floridian landscape where she grew up, are places where volatile organic systems intersect, and are full of science, storytelling and magical thinking. Through nested cycles of painting and unpainting, each canvas is a reenactment of the structures of nature flourishing and decaying from micro- to macrocosm.

the rift and the ring debuts landscape paintings and ceramics that are among the artist's most ambitious to date. “Somewhere between Thomas’ ‘rift’ and Yeats’ ‘ring’ is where I think these paintings live—cycles of nature, cycles of personality, and cycles of generations all tangled up,” the artist writes, “The mental universe in which these fragments of disparate places and times cohere and dissolve is a kind of garden to me. And like any garden it’s a space where what’s wild and sprawling is touched by human imagination, and in doing so is made different from and stranger than what it was." Dense with color and mood, Drew seeks the mysterious past and an indescribable future within this new group. Made between sessions on site and in her studio, the coalescing organic forms in the paintings are echoed by the gestural markings scratched into the ceramics. These active surfaces show the artist's hand and process, lending them a loose immediacy and plasticity, and enhancing their physicality—a dynamic, shifting relationship that can only be fully perceived with careful looking, emerging from commingled passages.