SACRED WOUND

February 8th - February 19th

Reception: February 8th, 5-7pm.

Strata Gallery presents its third Emerging Member solo exhibition. Sacred Wound by California-based artist Phillip Byrne opens February 8th, with a special reception on the same day, from 5-7 pm.

Sacred Wound features installation work derived from a multidisciplinary practice addressing issues of illness and the body. In this show, paper is utilized as both primary material and as metaphor for the body. Crumpled, folded, torn, eroded, splattered, soaked, dyed, dissolved, baptized, stapled, compacted, glued, and reshaped - paper undergoes multiple cycles of fragmentation, and reformation. These transformations give rise to surfaces and forms evocative of and shifting between palimpsest and skin, flower and viscera, and volcanic rock and bodily organ.

Phillip Byrne stated in a recent interview, “I’m so excited to be an emerging artist at Strata Gallery and grateful for the opportunity to hold my first ever solo exhibition here.  I am interested in exploring bodily boundaries in my work; however, it is really the absence of bodily boundaries that interests me. I am fascinated by permeability - how the world seeps into the body and the body seeps into the world. During the creation of this work, I have been meditating on the ways in which illness dissolves and transforms the body’s boundaries, and how wounds can act as forces of both unraveling and dissolution as well as growth and change.”

Phillip Byrne received a BA in Studio Art from CSU Stanislaus and is currently an MFA candidate at UC Davis.

Cover Image: Untitled 4 (Detail) Canvas, paper, dye, glue, branches, Actual size, 96 x 432 x 36, 2022.

Phillip Byrnes, In Bloom, digital video, Dimensions Variable, 2022.