House of Breath
House of Breath, the first survey of works by Arryn Snowball, comprises of a gracefully bookended decade of the artist’s output. The exhibition is served well with a considered hang and breathing space, and makes a compelling argument for more exhibitions of artists of Snowball’s generation, who have survived and are approaching artistic maturity. Taking the title from a William Goyen novel, itself a paean to love, yearning, loss, and a sense of home, House of Breath charts a narrative, by proxy, of Snowball’s own life. There are no literal readings to be had here, other than to say that the exhibition is the culmination of a decade of the artist’s life, and all that suggests.
As House of Breath demonstrates, there are recurring themes that orbit Snowball’s work, manifesting in different ideas, and through contrasting approaches to painting and image-making. I add the caveat of ‘image making’ because some of the artist’s non-paintings are represented in this survey, seemingly without any jarring, or even imbalance, with painted works. Photography and video sit calmly beside the paintings, extending and exploring the same ideas through their own idiosyncrasies of form and media. While a painting-only survey would have worked well in terms of a robust monument to Snowball’s own vision, the inclusion of other media serves to tease out the artist’s ideas, and serves this vision better, in terms of demonstrating its quiet effectiveness through these non-paintings. Remarkably, no power or intention is lost in translation.
While the type of conversation that surrounds Snowball’s work has become somewhat tiresome of late (‘form and formlessness, abstraction versus representation’), one must remember that this is well-trod territory for the artist, whose own course