Emergent Landscapes: Mountains, Music, & Improvisation in the Paintings of Abie Harris
August 24th, 2021 - February 19, 2022 | Rankin West Gallery
Abie Harris, Appalachian Concerto - Kruger Brothers #7, 2020, watercolor, acrylic, and marker on paper. Courtesy of the artist
Abie Harris paints the mountains—he also paints the equally dynamic landscape of Bluegrass music. He is often doing both of these things at the same time. Rooted in Harris’s iterative approach to painting, the pictures in Emergent Landscapes arise from repetitive close study—of the vistas surrounding his family’s 19th-century home in the town of Blowing Rock and of the vernacular music traditions that aurally describe the region.
Emergence, in the context of art, describes a phenomenon in which the value or meaning of an object or image is greater than the sum of its parts, possessing some quality that is absent from its individual components. In the natural world, the seemingly synchronized swarming of birds in the sky or fish in the sea are also emergent structures. In this same way, Harris’s paintings synthesize mountain and valley alongside the ebb and flow of musical composition, integrating the familial, communal, and imagined landscapes of Blowing Rock into abstract studies of the horizon.
Emergent Landscapes explores these links between Harris’s studio practice and his first career as University Architect at North Carolina State University, his family’s roots as early settlers of Blowing Rock, and his perennial fascination with the underlying, sometimes parallel, structures within the landscape, music, and built environments of rural North Carolina.
Abie Harris, Untitled, 2016, acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of the artist.
Abie Harris, Big House, 2019, charcoal on paper. Courtesy of the artist.
