Stellarhighway is excited to present Seven Sisters, a solo exhibition of new graphite drawings by Justine Kablack. Over the past several months Kablack has been continuing her enigmatic drawing practice, making work about winter in Maine “trying my best to conjure the ghost of a summer night.” She has centered her activity around ideas of the Pleiades, car culture, myth versus truth, and timekeeping.
Viewers of these works are brought into an everlasting daydream, journeying a silent world with a thousand-yard stare, lost in thought. A larger drawing, Star Chaser, offers twin views through a car windshield: a stretch of road illuminated only by headlights, with lights from other cars merging and trading places along the horizon. It is unclear if this is the same scene viewed stereoscopically from different positions in space or from different moments in time. In My Dreams You Walk Dripping carries us down the same nameless road, and the single blanket of graphite suggests this instance is a solo journey. 131 echoes the night that persists throughout these drawings, though at this moment the viewer is parked and gazing across the hood of a car at a patch that lingers defiantly between crashing waves and tall grass. In Loop we confront a bend in what may be a different road whose depths are concealed by night, though civilization glows over distant trees; a small sign with an arrow directs us left. The sign in The Lost Pleiad gives less. With Star Star the viewer encounters a cat—a guardian; a Sphinx—whose glowing eyes mirror the two stars in the sky and the conjoined starbursts of the Subaru Corporation logo (“Subaru” means “unite,” and is also the name for the Pleiades star cluster in Japanese). Key seems to complete the trip, filling the silhouette of a Subaru with a cloud of stars, the eponymous Seven Sisters.
To Kablack, this group defines a place and time. Each work seems to function like prehistoric ritual sites, as clocks or calendars for tracking the stars or seasons. However, the shift being tracked by these sites feels somehow more nebulous than time. In all of these drawings heavy strokes of lustrous graphite capture the aura of traveling the same unlit road night after night while small, softly wrought flowers, bees and starbursts tell of time spent considering those experiences. The road trip in this body of work is cyclical, or on repeat, and is less of an adventure than it is a pilgrims’ journey into darkness. A fifth-century monk named Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite once prayed “that we may come unto this Darkness which is beyond light, and, without seeing and without knowing, to see and to know that which is above vision and knowledge through the realization that by not-seeing and unknowing we attain to true vision and knowledge.” In this, these drawings are concerned with how we keep and measure ourselves as individuals in the context of a community, how memories and emotions change as we gain distance from the events that spawned them, and how truth is found by feeling your way through the unknown.
About Justine Kablack
Justine Kablack graduated MICA in 2013 and attended BHQFU in 2017. Recent solo shows include whip-poor-will at Buoy Gallery, Kittery, ME and Where the Raspberries Grow Wild at SISTERED, Rockland, ME. Her work has been included in group shows including Rachel Uffner, New York; at Mrs., Queens; Interloc, Rockland; New Systems Exhibitions, Portland; and The Magenta Suite, Exeter. Residencies include Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Elephant Butte Lake and the Women’s Residency for Transmodern Awareness. Kablack is co-founder of the collective platform SISTERED, and resides in Rockland, ME
