201 Washington St, Reading, PA 19601

In this immersive exhibition, artist Sally Veach uses sight and sound to investigate her ancestry and humanity’s historical drive to control natural systems and nature’s indomitable power.  This is her most ambitious show to date.

The installation explores how the philosophical concept of the Sublime—that overwhelming sense of awe and terror before nature’s magnitude—finds renewed urgency as climate anxiety intensifies. Hubris, humanity’s arrogant confidence in its dominion over the natural world, stands in stark opposition to the Sublime. The exhibition examines this tension: our persistent belief that we can master nature even as we face the consequences of that arrogance.

Veach employs energetic gestural strokes to invoke the power of the natural world. She sources decorative patterns and botanical illustrations from museums and rare-book library collections, using them as metaphors for humanity’s impulse to control and commercialize nature. Historic Indian chintz textile patterns represent colonialism and the cotton trade. Scientific illustrations indicate the naming and ordering of the natural world as another form of control and appropriation. These elements are layered over gestural representations of sublime natural power and romantic landscape interpretations. Many works feature frayed and fringed edges that remind viewers the substrate is cloth made from cotton or linen.Yellow Boy: Ancestral Reckoning on the Red Moshannon takes this investigation further. Drawings created with iron oxide pigments harvested from acid mine drainage on her ancestral coal-leased land in Pennsylvania transform toxic legacy into art. Proceeds of drawing sales are donated to the Moshannon Creek Watershed Association for remediation efforts.