Lynette Haggard, Possibly Biased, from the Pell Lucy exhibit, The Unexplained Necessary
To view to entire exhibit on Artsy, click here.
These are not easy times to speak of beauty, mystery, or quietude. The world feels increasingly harsh—bluntly shaped by politicians, billionaires, demagogues, and the machinery of attention. The rest of us are being trained to react rather than reflect, to accept realities flattened into slogans. Certainty has become performative. So much now feels staged for profit or manipulation.
To assemble an exhibit in times like these—one titled The Unexplained Necessary—is not an attempt to escape our relentless reality. It is a simple refusal to surrender.
Art cannot change our circumstances the way politicians and billionaires can and do. It doesn’t pass laws, underwrite elections, or manipulate the news. But art changes us. It changes what we are able to feel, what we remember, what we notice. It can even alter what we choose to refuse. It is one of the only forces I know that restores dimensionality to perception and interiority—to the quiet, private experience of being a conscious human being.
This latest Pell Lucy online exhibition brings together artists whose works emerge from a place beyond the zone of certainty—before that human urge to pin everything down flattens the field and strips out what still sparkles with mystery. In this other terrain, intuition gets to lead and form follows its own quiet will. The works in this show do not function as declarations or self-explanations. They are not made to deliver a point. They belong to a lineage of visual inquiry that trusts what cannot yet be named.
That matters right now, because we are living in a culture that has grown contemptuous of the unnamed. Everything must be categorized, branded, aligned, weaponized. Even our sorrow and our hope are expected to arrive prepackaged.
But this is not what visual art is for.
These artists ask for a different kind of attention than the world currently demands. The work resists the hasty rush to comprehend. Instead it invites us into the in-between, where something essential is sensed long before it can be understood. It trusts the viewer. It asks us to be present long enough for the work to begin its slow revelation. That feels like a quiet form of courage in this moment.
I believe making art—and looking at art—are among our most reliable ways back to the authentic. In dark times there is a tendency to harden: to become armored, protected, locked in. But the opposite may be what saves us—to stay permeable to awe, tenderness, and nuance. This is one way to keep the doors of perception from closing.
The Unexplained Necessary is just one small offering in that direction. This gathering of works honors what is opaque and quietly insistent. It reminds us that some of the most vital encounters we have are not the ones we can easily explain.
As John Berger wrote: “What seems like a mere trace may be the appearance of something that is about to reveal itself.”
That, to me, is one of the spiritual promises of art. It will not fix the world. But it can keep us capable of living in it—without losing our ability to perceive, to understand, to change, to evolve.
The curatorial statement for the show is included below.
A sad note
I also want to share the news that Pell Lucy member Sandra Lerner has passed away. Sandra was an astonishingly hardworking artist with a deeply coherent vision—one that wove science, cosmology, and visual language into a stellar body of work. She was creating with remarkable vitality right up to the end. She was 89 years old, and she was a dear friend to me.
We honor her life, and her extraordinary body of work:
Sandra Lerner, at June Kelly Gallery
THE UNEXPLAINED NECESSARY
CURATORIAL STATEMENT
The Unexplained Necessary presents artists whose works emerge from a place prior to certainty—before that human urge to pin things down flattens the field and strips out what sparkles with mystery. In this rarefied terrain, intuition gets to lead and form can follow its own quiet will.
The works in this exhibit are not illustrations of ideas or acts of self-explanation; they belong to a lineage of visual inquiry that trusts what cannot yet be named. They invite viewers into the felt, the provisional, the in-between—where something essential is sensed long before it is understood. Here, materiality yields to a sense of immateriality through touch, pigment, surface, structure, and by allowing what is less tangible—yet unmistakably present—to come forward.
Though varied in material and method, these works share an allegiance to processes that resist haste. They unfold slowly, and they allow texture, interval, rhythm, and resonance to speak on their own terms. What emerges is a form of recognition that is not logical but embodied—a reminder that perception operates in strata beyond verbal language. These artists make works that develop their own intelligence, and they enable every individual to craft their own experience—self-directed and self-defined.
The Unexplained Necessary suggests that the most vital encounters with art occur when the seeking after comprehension gives way to just being in the presence of a work The primal experience of the visual is not prepackaged; it arises as a co-creation between the viewer and the work. By honoring the opaque and the quietly insistent, these encounters affirm the importance of what we cannot fully explain and yet we continue to seek. It is in that interval—between the known and the unknowable—that art does its deepest work.
“What seems like a mere trace may be the appearance of something that is about to reveal itself.”
– John Berger