LaViolaBank Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of “Outside In,” a group exhibition curated by Mary Dailey Pattee and featuring the work of six artists: Daphne Arthur, Marina Berio, Diane Carr, Mira O’Brien, Leighton Pierce and Christopher Saunders.

Outside In is a multi-media exploration of the connection between real space and the landscape of the subjective mind. Drawing on land, sea, sky and the atmosphere of imagined vistas, the artists in this exhibition engage the landscape tradition as a means of addressing broader questions related to entropy, destruction and renewal in the contemporary world.

Daphne Arthur’s paintings and reliefs quite literally bring the outside in. Figures alternately emerge from or retreat into fictive landscapes evoking a dream-like illusion that forcefully navigates between chaos and calm, life and death.

For her “Through and Not” series, Marina Berio created charcoal drawings of her own photographs of landscapes seen through a window of a traveling car. Drawn from the negative, these images not only question the physical and formal imperatives of photography, but also interrogate the value of binary oppositions like positive/negative, yes/no, outside/inside.

Diane Carr’s paintings reference dense forests and frozen seascapes only to transform them through dramatic shifts in scale, expressionistic brushwork and heightened color. Natural phenomena become painterly meditations on the elusive boundary between the real and the fantastical, the representational and the abstract.

To walk on Mira O’Brien’s glass floor is to feel the weight of one’s own vision. In order to see the photographs underneath the glass, viewers must tread on it, fracturing its surface and obscuring the images of remote seas below. Like the shadows traced in the accompanying drawings, the seascape beneath the glass grows further from our grasp the closer we come to it.

Agency of Time (1 d) is part of Leighton Pierce’s long-term project consisting of symphonic, multi-channel video/sound installations and single photographs. Juxtaposing rich cascading imagery of an abstracted landscape with the counterpoint of a soundtrack composed by the artist, Pierce disintegrates the projection plane, encouraging viewers to embody the perceptions of the video solidly within themselves.

Christopher Saunders activates traditional landscape painting by collapsing the boundary between the external spaces of nature and the internally held histories of the self. Drawing on personal photographs and journalistic images, Saunders’ landscapes explore both physical and imaginary settings while unearthing notions of place as mediated by experience and memory.

Is there really a hard and fast boundary between the outside and the inside? Are we ever merely on one side or the other? Or are we, these artists ask, somehow straddling all sides at once—always, that is, outside and in?