“Know that joy is rarer, more difficult, and more beautiful than sadness.
Once you make this all-important discovery, you must embrace joy as a
moral obligation.” — Andre Gide
The loss of both my mother and my husband (with whom I was still close though separated) in the course of 5 months produced a radical shift in the focus of my work, moving it from social commentary in general to a more personal inquiry. Since I had long considered one’s life to be one’s most significant work of art, this shift illumined the obvious realization that what is actually going to work in restoring planetary integrity is personal and simple: Each person doing whatever they can to live happily and joyfully, while supporting and contributing to the things that make life worth while to them.
This exhibition is therefore offered as a sort of “archeological dig,” expressed in the various collected flotsam and ephemera of a personal life, as well as representations of work created or collected during the various tributaries of a life’s journey. It also offers an intimation of the difficulties in discovering the mysterious inner workings of another, when so much of what we hear and see is necessarily hidden to us, not only through their departures, but in our day to day involvements with them as well.
One thing that assembling this exhibition has brought home to me again and again is that there will never be enough “things” to present that can begin to touch in any way the profound shifts in my own psyche each of these items represent. There is a history in each element that is a doorway – similar to studying one’s dreams – into the exploration of the inner world, which is the true home of our greater selves.
Cherilyn Naughton April 6, 2016
Brief bio: Cherilyn Naughton learned how to think as an artist at San Francisco Art Institute, guided and goaded by mentor Bill Geis, who would cajole, attack and lovingly bludgeon the artists he believed in until they would (finally, sometimes) begin to see…. A couple of gallons of $2.84 Safeway wine, bad weed and all night seminars…yeah. Those were the days…