by Stephanie Snyder
Lynne Woods Turner’s works on paper and canvas do not ferry images in any traditional sense; rather, they reveal the odyssey of forms engaged in their own détournement, like life companions — the best kind. The kind you walk the world with, intimately, often silently, sharing the textures and colors of time as they slip into memory and psychogeography. Importantly, Turner’s spatial journeys are a collection of turns, folds, and undulations that awaken the shapes within and around them. These gently rendered yet precise divisions are recognizable to us as patterns that unite meaning and time, as in poems, Renaissance gardens, or baseball diamonds: spaces where the mind lingers in harmony with geometry.
This essay appeared in CONDITIONS, a publication of The Ford Family Foundation. The annual arts journal (shifting title as it progresses) is part of the program element CRITICAL CONVERSATIONS, led by the University of Oregon with partners Portland State University, The Cooley Gallery, Reed College; and PNCA at Willamette University.
The title and concept for CONDITIONS came into focus as the editorial team launched its first issue, FIGURING. Here, we shift from FIGURING’s multiple perspectives on the body and the psyche to examine the cultural and biological mysteries and actualities of life at this tenuous environmental and socio-political moment. As our need for breath and sustenance are foregrounded across an accounting of our shared lives, we hope that CONDITIONS offers a space to meditate on the ways in which works of art (including writing) support us in making meaning from our state of, and provisions for, being.
Featured Contributors: Amelia Rina, Laura Butler Hughes, Luiza Lukova, Sara Krajewski, Malia Jensen, Lumi Tan, Steph Littlebird, Ido Radon, Alejandro Espinoza Galindo, Stephanie Gervais, Stephanie Snyder, K. Silem Mohammad, Prudence Roberts, Sara Jaffe.