STATEMENT

“In our bewildering times, Wylie Sofia Garcia has been tending. She tended to her children as they weathered a pandemic and life changes, to a beloved friend as she died, to the flowers in her garden, and to her paintings. “What do you need?” she asked her paintings as she worked. She painted botanical forms, applied fluorescent washes, darkened areas with inky sepia-blues, or summoned forth rushing white blooms or prussian blue petals or sprightly pink hepatica; through this efflorescence, the paintings gathered toward a fullness and completeness she recognized. Amid the uncertainty, illness, and violence of our time, the continuous unfolding of parenthood, and the loss of a dear friend, the paintings in Tending Constellations became a passage toward an inhabitable future. They accumulate gestures of care into painted form, they mark a soft pathway through a rough present, they open onto a tended garden.”

-AMY RAHN