Bushel opens new exhibition Inside Voice by Saira McLaren and Nancy Diamond, April 8

DELHI, NY— Bushel is pleased to present Inside Voice, a two-person exhibition of paintings, drawings, and collage by Saira McLaren and Nancy Diamond. This show brings together two artists whose work is deeply informed by their shared environment, particularly the mountains that in our Catskills region are both around us and beneath us; as we view them, we are in and among them too. The exhibition runs April 8–30, 2023, with an opening reception on Saturday, April 8, 3–5 pm. In conjunction with the show, on Friday, April 21, 7 pm, Bushel will screen the film noir Night of the Hunter (1955, directed by Charles Laughton), selected by McLaren and Diamond for Bushel’s monthly Community Film Pick. The exhibition, opening reception, and film screening are all free and open to the public. Bushel is located at 106 Main Street, ground floor, in Delhi, NY. 

Diamond and McLaren each possess a highly developed language of vision that reveals itself as equally as a language of emotion and experience. Nancy Diamond’s “exploratory” paintings are grounded in observation—the cataloging and collecting of visual information—but the resulting imagery bears an indeterminate, hallucinatory quality that seems to bend the rules of macro- versus micro-vision, inviting an inward-turning reception of what the artist terms a “distinctly sensitized” terrain. Saira McLaren’s vivid canvases—each one a view painted through a window, from indoors—are not so much abstracted landscapes as accurate pictures of an instance of apprehension, of an associative and affective meaning that resists resolution, providing, in the artist’s words, “a response to the culture of immediacy and the fragmentation of time.” Together, the paintings in Inside Voice invite a renewed curiosity toward our environment and toward our ways of seeing and interpreting it, aptly falling during the time of year in which the outside begins to call.

Inside Voice is part of Bushel’s ongoing series of Alumni shows—exhibitions and happenings proposed by artists who have exhibited at Bushel in the past, and who agree to invite or engage at least one other artist or maker who has not yet been exhibited at Bushel. Inside Voice’s curating artist is Saira McLaren, whose two-person show with Colie Collen, “Deep Library,” took place in 2018 at Bushel’s former location.