Bockley Gallery is pleased to announce Grace Rosario Perkins’ (Diné/Akimel O’odham) debut solo exhibition with the gallery and in the Midwest. Fruits of the Spirit features Perkins’ signature gestural, densely layered, abstract paintings that exude the methods and intentions of their becoming: the artist’s intuitive conjuring of ritual and family – generations past, present, and future – to transmute hope, grief, and expansive feeling. Interested in disassembling her personal narrative through layering words, objects, colors and signs, she has referred to her practice as pictorial storytelling and scenographic placemaking.
Through maximal surfaces that carry additive and subtractive negotiations, Perkins refuses legible visual narratives. Of late, she conceptually and physically folds medicinal plant studies into her existing practice with spray paint, acrylic, and diaristic ephemera.