katherine sandoz

Exhibition details:

On View: March 29 - June 1, 2024
Reception: April 4, 6 - 8:30pm

Savannah-based artist Katherine Sandoz’ study of The Lotus Sutra, paired with her long-term survey of Coastal Empire floodplains, rivers, and ponds, inspires this most recent series of forty-four works on canvas. Originally written in Sanskrit, The Lotus Sutra is a revered final teaching of Buddhist scripture, which suggests that earthbound individuals may reach enlightenment in their lifetime. In the dharma (teaching of the nature of reality), the lotus personified is an actor in an unfolding drama and its theater, the universe. Speaking to us in a collage of images, the lotus “language” inspires these two series created over the last two years.

Sandoz positions the lotus as her subject and star, creating a multi-layered expression where sky, water, clouds, and plant life are entangled and often indiscernible from one another. Looking at the series through a material and a temporal lens, Sandoz uses water as both a setting and a tool. Each image consists of water-soaked layers of acrylic paint and fibrous planes which mirrors the composition of the aquatic plant itself. Conceptually, the “unfolding drama” of the lotus above and below the surface suggests the one and the all, the “everythingness” of being. The Lotus Sutra teachings and the paintings they inspire hint at what we see and what we don’t see. The watery ways of the resilient lotus, flowering and seeding at once, point to the mystery, depth, and beauty embedded within nature and us.