Start Deep 

December 15th - January 28th 2024

Artists: bARBER and Tish Noel

“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.” 

― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time 

In February 2020 Tish Noel decided to switch gears and choose a new substrate for painting. She stood in the studio and weighed the options. Continue with work on polypropylene or move to canvas, what size? A voice said “Hey! You know you just want to paint on catalog pages.” “Yes!” She began this series and hasn’t stopped and will continue until the voice tells her otherwise. 

Start Deep is a multi-generational two person show that features work by Tish Noel and bARBER. Both artists work in recycled everyday materials to create landscapes and paintings that have an embedded context for climate change, racial capitalism, and social dystopia. They use artist intuition to guide them through material and process. Through Tish Noel’s consumer catalog painting’s and bARBER’s three- dimensional artwork the artists build beauty through color and texture. The show navigates the ongoing toxic environment that starts deep by digging into human creativity and imagination to layer colorful raw emotion and incite a utopian future in an irrational world.