Brooklyn-based and Southwest-informed, Eleanor Ray’s paintings are small works of attention—often around six by eight inches, oil on panel. Among her influences is philosopher Simone Weil, who understood attention as prayer.
“It is not without irony,” says sculptor Gillian Genser, “that the creation of this piece was to be my demise.” When she set out to depict the story of the first man, Adam, Genser sought to reimagine the man who should have been. Not the one given dominion over the earth. Genser reimagined a different starting point: an original person who didn’t subdue but was in “interconnected coexistence with all other life on this planet,” as she writes in her artist’s statement. What would that look like?