Thresholds

“Thresholds” an exciting new exhibit opens on Friday, October 13 from 4 – 6pm at Gualala Arts. Featuring the collaborative work of poet John Allen Cann and painter Mike Connor. After a chance meeting at a Gualala Arts Opening Connor and Cann intuited they already knew each other as if from another lifetime. Dialogues ensued about living on this stretch of coast, this threshold between earth and sea. Both felt kinship by being drawn to this specific locale; Connor describes it as his ‘thin place’—Cann as well experiences the spiritual presence and power where stone meets foam. They both revel in the alchemy of the seashore.
There have been many friendships between poets and painters—John Keats and Benjamin Robert Haydon, Guillaume Apollinaire and Pablo Picasso, Andre Breton and Marcel Duchamp, Frank O’Hara and Grace Hartigan, to mention a few—but seldom have such friendships engaged in a collaboration with their respective arts as this exhibit does.

Sparked by this stretch of coast, this exhibit with combine the work of both artists in an exploration of thresholds between what can be seen and what’s beyond sight, what can be said and what’s unsayable, through the agency of paint and word. Key will be the interplay of poems and paintings, and how they compel or invite us into invisible or inward dimensions.

We all move through thresholds of experience—from childhood on—thresholds are where experience of the Real opens into the unknown.
In this collaboration, painter and poet both engage the same problem, the problem of giving mystery a form while still keeping it a mystery, by intimating through their respective arts, what’s beyond the evidence of our senses.

Pencil and brush
are mad to befriend
the unseen source.

The poet will perform the Threshold poems early on during the Opening.