left: Marcus Clarke, right: Nathan Rice
Join us for an artist talk with Marcus Clarke and Nathan Rice about their work in Witnessing Nearness. Doors open 5-7pm, with the talk starting at 5:30pm.
Witnessing Nearness is about the different beats of relationships along the horizontal and vertical axis. Artists Nathan Rice and Marcus Clarke met over an overlapping semester of their MFA graduate programs in San Antonio, TX. They found quick camaraderie and solace in each other’s faiths and their art practices, and interestingly, they’ve found their work meets at the horizon line, with a gaze of what is above and below.
To expand this conversation, Marcus’s and Nathan’s work uniquely parallels the historical exchange between artist and friends Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. Nathan’s abstract, gestural paintings of flowers and gardens explore the sanctity of the created world and quotidian labor, a reformed theology reminiscent of van Gogh’s Dutch Protestantism. On the other hand, Marcus’s work of sculptural and architectural installations with light, often using colored, defused LED lights to atmospheric effect, is reminiscent of Paul Gauguin’s color fields that are backdrops for mystic encounters. Like Gauguin, he deploys numinous visual language to question the ends of perception and ponder what lies beyond our abilities to perceive and know with our senses. As Gauguin’s Vision After The Sermon (1888) and Van Gogh’s The Sower (1888) are in conversation with each other about these theologies and philosophies, this show creates unique conversations held in tensions when a gaze towards the transcendental and the temporal meet. In this exploration of their works and their reference to sky and land, we can meditate on how something as abstract and as far as the horizon can also, in the suspension of unbelief, be near, intimate, and even immediate.
— Marcus Clarke & Nathan Rice
Marcus Clarke makes objects and installations charged to be sites of self-inquiry. Raised with a physicist for a father and with a deep curiosity in theology a la his mother, he has a unique perspective from which to approach the metaphysical and ontological as pathways to embracing the unseen and unknown. Similar to the big Texas sky he was raised under, he describes his work as both pastoral and foreboding and as a means of catharsis.
Marcus studied Advertising and Architectural History at Pratt Institute and Savannah College of Art and Design–he thinks deeply about media, communication, philosophy, theology, and the built environment. He lives in San Antonio and is an MFA candidate at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He’s pursued theological coursework at Duke Divinity School, assists in the studio of Matt Kleberg, and is active in education initiatives at the UTSA Southwest School of Art, Laity Lodge, and the Old School Makerspace. He is the current Artist and Curator in Residence at Vesper Austin.
Nathan R. Rice (b. 1991 San Antonio, Tx) is an artist exploring themes of color theory, abstraction, whimsey, and worship through design, drawing, and painting. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of North Texas in 2014 and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 2022.
As a husband and father, his work engages an ongoing dialogue between faith, family, doodling, nature, accidents, singing, and old paintings.
"I believe in order to understand." - Augustine