JACKSON HOLE, WYOMING – MAYA FRODEMAN GALLERY is pleased to present Eyes Turned Skyward,a solo exhibition of recent works on paper by Celia Gerard. These works will remain on view at the gallery's downtown location in Jackson Hole from July 31st through September 14th, 2025. An artist reception will be held Thursday, July 31st from 5 to 8pm. The artist will be in attendance. All are welcome.
Eyes Turned Skyward presents a new body of work that builds upon Celia Gerard’s long-standing investigation into the poetics of abstraction and the epistemology of form. These mixed-media drawings, constructed through drawing, erasure, sanding, collage, and reconfiguration, engage abstraction not as a reductive system but as a generative, open-ended method for spatial and metaphysical inquiry.
Gerard’s practice occupies a hybrid space between architectural structure and atmospheric fragility. Repeating geometric motifs—triangles, arcs, radiating planes—are embedded within veiled, sanded surfaces that suggest both accumulation and erosion. Each work evolves through a durational process that deliberately foregrounds its own making and unmaking. The material operations—scoring, layering, tearing—function as both formal strategies and conceptual signals, questioning the permeability of boundaries (between object and image, gesture and structure, presence and trace) while searching for objectively true form.
Critically, Gerard’s work enters into dialogue with a lineage of artists who approach abstraction as a mode of philosophical and affective labor—Hilma af Klint, Agnes Martin, and Dorothea Rockburne being early reference points. But Gerard also positions herself in relation to more contemporary discourses around feminist materiality and embodied time. Her process aligns with what theorist Elizabeth Grosz describes as “volumetric thinking”—a way of making form that resists flatness, literalism, or speed. The work resists the visual economy of immediacy; instead, it proposes slowness, accumulation, and the durational trace of attention as critical acts.
Gerard’s use of simple, traditional materials—paper, graphite, gesso, pigment—further distances her practice from spectacle. Her surfaces bear evidence of labor and revision, situating the work within contemporary conversations around “slow abstraction” and the aesthetics of maintenance. The pieces are not resolved images but iterative structures—visual propositions that remain open to change, failure, and reassembly.
The title Eyes Turned Skyward introduces a cosmological register, but it is not prescriptive. Rather than invoking the spiritual in dogmatic terms, Gerard’s work engages what cultural theorist Jane Bennett might call “the sensuous specificity of matter”—a material poetics that attends to the resonance of form, the presence of absence, and the quiet thresholds between the visible and the felt. These drawings do not illustrate transcendence; they enact a persistent, processual striving toward it.
By emphasizing process over product, and material fact over symbolic gesture, Gerard’s work offers a subtle yet potent critique of dominant visual economies. In a moment characterized by speed, image saturation, and algorithmic flattening, Eyes Turned Skyward insists on the value of looking slowly, of thinking spatially, and of remaining open to the unknown. It is in this suspended, scaffolded state of becoming that Gerard’s work finds its most urgent relevance.
Celia Gerard (b. 1973, raised in NYC) received her BA with Honors in Art and Art History from Colgate University, her MFA in Sculpture from the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture and her EdM from Harvard University. In addition, she studied with Nicolas Carone and Bruce Gagnier at the International School of Art in Umbria, Italy. One-person exhibitions include Sears-Peyton Gallery; Maya Frodeman Gallery, Jackson, WY; John Davis Gallery, Hudson, NY. Her work has been included in numerous national and international group exhibitions, including the National Academy Museum, New York, NY and Harvard University. Awards and grants include the S.J. Wallace Truman Fund Award for graphics from the National Academy Museum; Artist-in-residence, the New York Studio School; Seligman/ Von Simpson award for excellence in sculpture; LCU foundation grant; and a sculpture fellowship from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Her work has been written about in ARTnews, The Daily Beast, ARTSY, Artspace, The NY Sun, Parabola, works & conversations, and City Arts. She currently teaches at the School of Visual Arts, and has taught at Columbia University, Pratt Institute, Bard College, Swarthmore, the New York Studio School, Saint Ann’s School and Riker’s Island Correctional Facility. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
