"My work has always been about relational dynamics: friend to friend, love to love, mother to child...but in recent years it's grown from the microcosm of my little world to include the relational dynamics of individual to community, community to the world at large, and the world at large to the environment." In the exhibition Freytag’s Pyramid artist Seonna Hong uses the framework of novelist Gustav Freytag’s dramatic structure to visually chronicle the ebb and flow of life, memory, and human experience. The structural elements of storytelling as laid out by Freytag are broken up into a five-part pyramid; exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and finally denouement. Hong’s paintings visually evoke the tension and drama of storytelling. Her figures, typically women drive the narrative across landscapes varying from rocky and rugged, to hazily rendered liquidlike dreamscapes. Each canvas reveals moments of chaos and calm, reality and fiction, illustration and abstraction. Hong’s work successfully balances controlled graphics and intuitive, loose application of materials revealing what every story does, the grandness of the shared human experience. Exhibition runs June 28 - July 17, 2024

Sink/Rise continues photographer Nick Brandt’s series “The Day May Break” which eloquently captures communities who are affected by environmental destruction. The local people in these photos, photographed underwater off the coast of the Fijian islands, are representatives of the many people whose homes, land and livelihoods will be lost in the coming decades as the water rises. “Although they are several meters below the surface, the subjects of Brandt’s mesmerizing photographs do not float or swim. Incredibly, they sit on sofas, stand on chairs, use seesaws, and pose in ways they might on land. The effect is otherworldly, as though the familiar laws of physics have stalled in this strange, liminal zone between land and sea.” (Zoe Lescaze) The artist himself will further discuss his creative process and the ethos behind “Sink / Rise” during a speaking engagement at The Community Library in Ketchum, ID, on July 11. Register via The Community Library website. Following the discussion on the 11th, there will be a reception at the gallery at 6:30, all are welcome.