Meeting in Motion is an exhibition of new paintings by Grace Rosario Perkins at Company Gallery. I’m on the phone with her. I take four drops of the creosote and blue kyanite essence she made me and put on my sneakers. I’m walking in the desert we both love when she tells me betrayal is a gift. She tells me she’s buying herself flowers. She tells me she’s danced on one of her paintings.

We usually talk while I’m walking, while she’s on her way to the train, to the studio, to the spa. I’m in Arizona, she’s in New York, but she knows this desert, the Southwest, as home. I pinch at JPEGs of the new paintings, swiping and zooming, reading and looking. The canvases are color fields, grounds, compost heaps, rich with the sediment of her personal glossary of symbols and signposts—stars, webs, flowers, Grace Rosario Perkins, words. Even through the cramped window of my phone I can sense the grit of crushed salt and crystal, the layers of gesso and overpainting, layers that hold both erasure and time. On the other line she tells me more isless.

I crush some creosote between my fingers and release that smell—subtle, strong, mineral, ready for rain. I look at the paintings and sift the details of her open-handed abstraction, sense plants and flowers sprinkled into wet paint. The simple linear scaffolds—heart, flower, star, planet, letter—are hung with so much noise, ornamented with secrets, adorned with the ephemera of personal history (altar materia, journal fragments, tinfoil, jade). I let the words she has sown in that rich ground inflect the feeling tone of each piece. HAPTIC. NODAL. FOREVER.

Movement, accumulation, and expression pile up, rhythm and blues. I notice emergences: what is clear and what is muddy, what is linear and what is diffuse, all boldly demonstrating choice, freedom, self-signification. I feel her moving my attention remotely, remote-sensing, through the medium of the work. A diary in real time, infused with her recent past, her ancestry, her invocations for now, for you. Like the medicine she makes for friends and tarot clients, each painting is spellwork, a custom formula, a tonic of color, work, and play.

She tells me she’s been going dancing, making friends on the dance floor. Motion stays in the paintings. Even in finished form, the energy of the unfinished is there. The action of making stays central: making a painting to be read like a poem; making a painting to throw her voice across timelines; making a painting porous, to skip across the false borders of ego.

Transpersonal capsules, her paintings straddle the autobiographical and the universal, prayers for personal and collective healing. I’ve always felt the generosity of Grace’s painting is that she shows us her process on the canvas, plainly, but with complexity and challenge, a little punk, with some push-back and an open heart. At an hour & forty-five she tells me she’s “pulling in all the elements to make sense of it, but it’s all in motion, I don’t know…”

– Laura Copelin