Lurking: Valerie Navarrete

How do you bring scientific thought to life? How do you explain the mystics of the world in a tangible way? These are some of the questions that Valerie Navarrete is grappling with in her newest body of work.

Navarrete has always had a profound love for both the arts and sciences. In college, she double majored in painting and molecular cellular developmental biology. In her graduate program, Navarrete began researching epigenetics, the study of how your behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect how your genes work. It was through this research that she discovered CH Waddington, a scientist that commissioned artists to create landscapes based off his theories and research. This unconventional approach appealed to Navarrete and, eventually, this became the framework for her own paintings.

Utilizing her own research and inherited histories of scientific thought, these otherworldly, brightly colored landscapes began appearing on her canvases. Simultaneously, Navarrete was trying to reconcile the human experience in all its pluralities. Moving beyond her knowledge and research of epigenetics, Navarrete was trying to understand the duality of both the mystical and imperial in her own beliefs. Throughout her landscapes, moments of clarity begin to form with the use of incredibly detailed renderings of self and animals. The paintings begin floating in and out of lucidity through the use of the tight and loose mark making. The eyes found throughout each of the paintings are Navarrete’s own psyche acting as both a voyeur to this new frontier but also the witness to a new understanding of self and human existence, constantly lurking into the abyss.

Opening Reception:

Friday, October 30, 6-8pm