My Wild Heart

In What If We Joined Our Wildernesses Together?, Gabriel Guthrie explores the generative potential of seemingly opposing forces and the ways in which contradiction can deepen, rather than diminish, our understanding of experience. The series emerged from a visit to the Teshima Art Museum in Japan, where artist Rei Naito and architect Ryue Nishizawa conceived a space that exists as both open and closed, connecting art, architecture, and nature through an experience centered on the joy of living. During the same trip, Guthrie was reading Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights, a meditation on finding delight not apart from grief, difficulty, and loss, but alongside them. Gay’s question, “What if we joined our wildernesses together?”, became a point of departure for the collection, prompting Guthrie to consider what becomes possible when apparent opposites are understood not as competing forces, but as interconnected and mutually expansive.

Across seventeen works, Guthrie gives physical form to these ideas through juxtapositions of color, material, process, and composition. Green sits alongside red; water interacts with oil paint; additive gestures meet subtractive ones; concealed layers coexist with exposed surfaces; and restrained marks emerge against richly tactile passages. Each painting begins with a monoprinting process using plastic, producing delicate and unpredictable textures that evoke both the natural and the constructed, before layers of paint, oil pastel, and oil stick introduce a balance of intuition, intention, and chance. Several works extend across multiple canvases, with each component retaining its individual identity while simultaneously contributing to a larger whole. Through this interplay of separation and connection, Guthrie considers the subtle forces that shape relationships and the possibility that distinct entities—and seemingly contradictory states—can remain fully themselves while becoming something more through their entanglement.