The North Light is constant, never changing its direction. In that constant light, there is the shining sun’s circular shape, offering its cyclical manifest. In this exhibit, LOOKING NORTH, three artists from diverse backgrounds come together and look north to an open future, an unknown realm of possibilities. The circular sun shape is perfect and endless in its dimensions. The oneness of the North is a meditative study, meditation by way of embracing and activating the circle. The North star, Polaris, itself a circular illuminator, becomes the hopeful, metaphysical access to the North. The North is an aspiration, an ascent — and ascent implies a higher, greater experience in being.
Artists Karian Amaya, Shane Charles, and Margrethe Aanestad represent an interesting communion: Amaya is Mexican, Aanestad is Norwegian, and bridging that gap is Shane Charles, who is himself a living connector to the Northern European and the indigenous American, native to the Western Hemisphere. Charles is of Anglo-Saxon, Northern European —as Aanestad is Norwegian, also Northern European– but Charles is also of Native American heritage, as Amaya is indigenous Mexican, both Native to the North American Western Hemisphere.
Amaya’s Slow Sunset and Aanestead’s Untitled 2023 are feminine twins to Charles’ masculine Black Sun Rising. Both women’s works reflect a gentle, yet powerful, minimalism of design, with a powerful content underneath. Slow Sunset is made of Copper and Marble, materials mined from Amaya’s home soil. The almost Asian quality of both Untitled 2023 and Slow Sunset succeed as a “tour de force” of minimalist balance. Aanestad’s Untitled 2023 gloriously reflects this wondrous Asian minimalism, with a copper-colored circle dominating over a lighter pink circle. The copper circle is realized perfectly in its textured shape, while its cast shadow complements the pink circle underneath, subtly bleeding over the perfect shape, expanding into unknown truths, perhaps looking northerly?
Black Sun Rising, a very large piece, contains wood ash from Charles’ homeland in Maine, assembled from fragments of black canvas. It immediately calls to mind a dark shadow cast upon the landscape of Charles’ ancestors. The history between the Colonial Northern European settlers and the indigenous inhabitants is marred by war, destruction, and death. Charles’ ethnic makeup (Anglo-Saxon and Native American), itself, is a living synthesis of the native and the invader. Black Sun Rising is the aftermath of the conflict: first, conflict upon the land, then, conflict from within. Charles’ probable struggle with identity could be conceived as a war zone. He fully channels this emotional texturing into a powerfully conceived and realized existential self-portrait. The symbolic skin of this synthesized identity is marred (charred) by the destructive activity of the Invader, the European man. The soil within the texturing of the piece maintains Charles’ ecological connection to his Native ancestry.
Amaya’s Open Sky resembles a footprint in the soil. This footprint is, in a sense, the stepping stone behind the artistic inspiration of Amaya’s work. It also presents us with a bird’s eye view of the excavation process of mining copper in Amaya’s home country, Chihuahua Mexico: a concisely presented portrait of her country’s very economic sustenance.
Tales of Traces of Glimpses III, Part 1 has Aanestad presenting the almost invisible heatwaves of the sun, which could be understood as a kind of companion piece to the Sun-like form of Untitled 2023. Aren’t all the illuminations of the sun itself Tales of Traces of Glimpses of our own reality? Aanestad, instead of presenting the visible world, infers gently, and airily the comprehensive experience of the visible world.
Shane Charles’ Blue Hunter’s Moon I and II connect images of the moon, his feminine manifest, as a counterpart to his masculine Black Sun Rising. This photographic diptych may signal a healing process for Charles, as the moon’s gently feminine nocturnal illumination nurtures peacefully the previously harsh, masculine heat of the day.
The perfect circle of the masculine sun, whose aggressive rays penetrate the earth, and the perfect circle of the feminine moon, whose gentle glow is absorbed from the sun, present the duality behind this exhibition.
The circle: as realized symbolically as the feminine and the masculine; day and night — casting light — is an access to the all-encompassing content of that circle. We see the world as articulated, even activated, as a linguistic character (letter shape) — the circle. The North is our directional starting point on the compass. We find our way home by honing in on the North light. The home, ultimately, is realized within the act of our creative imagining and reconfirmation of the light, whether masculine sun or feminine moon: reproduction. We dwell in and contemplate and struggle with its inevitable influence. However, we always return to the security of home, looking northward — for our sanctuary HOME is, in actuality, the journey itself, savoring every precious ILLUMINATIVE moment.
Zero Thought to Z 
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