AmbiEssence: The Triplicate Flame

In AmbiEssence: The Triplicate Flame, artists Sam McLeish, Ashley Wetmore-Caissie, and Lora Brownson combine to illuminate the ways in which the process of art making brings to light the often overlooked and immaterial connections between time, nature, and the body. Through a myriad of mediums including print, sculpture, collage, and photography, McLeish, Wetmore-Caissie, and Brownson manipulate the elements of line, shape, form, and space to create a material landscape of our abstract conceptions of time, the unknown, and the unending cycles of nature. AmbiEssence: The Triplicate Flame transforms the gallery space into an immersive experience in which viewers are invited to contemplate the importance of emptiness, the invisible, and death. McLeish, Wetmore-Caissie, and Brownson converge to immolate our modern conceptions of nature and our place within it, highlighting our modern-day materialism and the ways in which our focus on what is seen makes us oblivious to the necessity of the invisible in nature’s
inevitable cycles of change. Through their manipulations of line, shape, form, and space, the
artists combine to reveal that what appears to be separate is instead intricately connected, the invisible constantly flowing between creation and destruction, like air’s importance to fire, and the ashes’ being integral to new growth.

- Curator Zachary Scola-Allison