Beacon Digest

Acrid Horizon” opens next Friday at

@hakanchocolatier

in Beacon, New York. Come drink wine and eat chocolate 🕸️

In this debut solo presentation of Valerie Mirra’s work, Acrid Horizon takes the canon of the nocturne, or nighttime painting, to charged and irradiated extremes of false and acidic light.

The body, the machine, and the forest expel flaming neons as the combustion of the material world mirrors the internal processes of decay and collapse.

Mirra’s scenes of man-made structures superimposed onto the stage of the natural world they push against are paired with scenes of internal mythos. Within the complex overlapping of the natural world and the manmade systems built upon it, new cycles of extraction, destruction, and rebirth are produced.

In a time of ecological loss and disconnect, the fragmentation of identity and subconscious language necessitates new and unusual descriptors of the inner condition. In a place where there is no night, the stillness of darkness marred by ceaseless technological incandescence, the strange light produced by industry colliding with nature is likened to the struggle of the psyche in catharsis.

Who are we without shadow? Who are we in the face of nuclear light, which shatters all?

The post-apocalyptic sublime is illuminated by fluorescence, split particles, and still, the ageless carbon of old bones underfoot.