Connection Point – Solo Exhibition Juneau, Alaska

Connection Point

September 7th – 28th, 2018 @ The Canvas Juneau, Alaska

Connection Point

Sketchbooks and journals open wide and stories pour forth as Lindsay Carron intimately reveals seven years of travels through artwork in her solo exhibition Connection Point. 

An artist and activist from Los Angeles, Lindsay has sought challenging and life-changing experiences to greater understand the planet and humanity.  Throughout her travels she brings stories and life lessons alive in her drawings, murals, photography and writing.

Connection Point features artwork, sound clips, videos, and journal entries from three distinct areas of Lindsay’s travels – Kenya, Mexico and Alaska – and queries as to the connection between the three.  What brings her back again and again to a small dirt road village in Baja California, or a vast tundra in Northern Alaska?  What pushes at her to reach across cultures, beyond languages, and outside of comfort zones and the scope of her reality?

With Connection Point, the viewer joins Lindsay in her quest and is offered an opportunity to connect to areas of the world that have unique and important qualities contributing to the current and future state of humanity.

Connection Point opened on September 7th, 2018 4:30 – 7pm at The Canvas in Juneau, Alaska.

(Photo by Michael Penn for Juneau Empire)

Alaska:

Simply stated, my life has been transformed by my time in Alaska.  Four years ago, I shook hands with Juneau for the first time, and plunged into the depths of her watery gracious heart.  From that point, I’ve been blessed with opportunities each year to travel with US Fish and Wildlife Service as an artist in residence in the National Wildlife Refuges of Alaska.  Bush planes and river boats have dropped me into some of the most remote areas I’ve ever witnessed where caribou and lichen continue their cycles that have lasted millions of years.  My heart has grown tender and many lessons have been learned by spending time with the Tlingit, Yup’ik, Inupiaq, and Gwich’in people of these lands.  I strive with every line I draw, every expression I detail, and every story I tell, to remember inside of myself that place where I am not separate from the land, that humans are guardians and stewards of precious places, and where harmony rests upon reciprocity and balance: a wild dance that is still alive in Alaska.

Mexico:

When I graduated from university in 2011, I began a quest to try to make a life in the bustling cityscape of Los Angeles.  My friend Karly, on the other hand, traveled to a tiny dirt road town in Baja California, Mexico to launch an after school program for kids, dedicating her life to this endeavor for the next decade.  This spurred three travels to Vicente Guerrero in 2012, 2014, and 2017 for two of my creative friends Courtney Branch and Stan Parker and I. We joined Karly to paint a massive mural at her program, called Oasis, and played endlessly with the kids. There were many more areas of need in Vicente Guerrero, and we soon found ourselves returning to lend our creativity to Mujeres Nuevo Comienzo, a women’s shelter offering a safe haven and new beginning for women dealing with extreme hardships in life.  Here, we listened to the stories of the women and drew their portraits, played with their kids, painted murals, and potted veggies and herbs.  We gifted the portraits to the women as mementoes of their strength, a gift that none of them had received before.  Their stories – the triumphs and the failures – have helped me understand the human experience, and my own life experience, on a whole new level.

Kenya:

Four years ago, my Kenyan friend Ngene Mwaura, then living in Los Angeles, asked me if I could teach him a few mural painting skills, as he was wishing to return to his village in Kenya and gift murals to his people.  I told him of course I’d share what I knew, and I also offered to join him.  We shook hands on it that day, and six months later we had raised the money, gathered the art team, and launched a one-month journey that took us from Ngene’s Kikuyu farming village in Northern Kenya, into the thriving hub of Nairobi, to the southern reaches of the Maasai Mara, and into the maze of shacks and street vendors of Kibera, Africa’s largest slum.  In each place we met with the people, learned their stories around campfires, chai, and goat roasts, drew their portraits, and gifted murals to their communities. The spirit of the Kenyan people, in all their diversity and complexity, lives on in my heart.  My encounter with the Motherland, the most ancient place of humanity’s beginnings, brought me closer to the notion that we are truly all from the same place, the same humble beginnings, and now in our dynamic world, there exists unity in diversity.

…….