Exhibition | There, There

There, There

“I love all things,
not because they are
burnished with glory
or have a golden sheen,
but because they are
only things.”
-Pablo Neruda

These paintings begin with the belief that looking closely is its own kind of commitment. They belong to a tradition of painters who understand observation not simply as description, but as a way of staying with the world long enough for it to become unfamiliar again. In Terry Powers’ work, affection is never sentimental or overstated. It emerges through attention itself: through the repeated act of returning to ordinary things and allowing them the time and space to fully register. Pipes in snowbanks, gates, tractor tires, construction beams, quilts, cluttered tabletops, backyard trees—these are modest subjects, but they are painted with such steadiness and concentration that they begin to exceed their own everydayness.

Powers paints as though nothing is beneath notice. A culvert pipe becomes monumental against winter light; a red gate cuts across a field with the force of abstraction; a yellow steel beam stretches through space like a modernist gesture discovered accidentally at a construction site. These paintings do not seek spectacle. Their drama comes instead from selection—from recognizing where visual pressure already exists in the world and holding it still long enough for it to become strange.

The work carries the atmosphere of a lived encounter rather than a staged composition. Dates and handwritten notes remain scrawled on surfaces like field annotations, reminders that these paintings are not inventions but meetings. And yet they are never simply descriptive. We extrapolate from them, as we do from the paintings; they are snapshots of a space that we imagine extending far beyond the edge of the canvas. The writing operates as a record that the artist stood there, returned there. The viewer becomes aware not only of the depicted object, but of the ongoing process of attention itself. 

Powers understands that representation and abstraction are neighboring languages. The paintings are built through shape relationships: dark against light, curve against angle, compression against openness. The tractor tire matters as much for its heavy black circular mass as for its identity as machinery. The quilt paintings oscillate between domestic artifact and pure geometry. Even the still lifes—glass jars, oranges, flowers—can at moments dissolve into arrangements of color and brushstroke before reassembling themselves as recognizable things.

This movement between object and abstraction gives the paintings much of their vitality. Looking at them, one continually shifts between reading the image and reading the paint itself. Brushstrokes sit on top of one another; edges flicker between precision and collapse; passages of quick notation coexist with areas of dense attention. The paintings refuse polished illusionism. Instead, they insist gently but firmly on their own making.

In this sense, the paintings also resist the habits of contemporary image culture, which increasingly trains us to scan rather than notice. Powers works against that velocity of seeing. His paintings ask for duration rather than reaction; they slow perception down enough for looking to become active again. What initially appears ordinary gradually reveals itself as visually dense and emotionally layered. 

Color operates less as an embellishment than as a structure. Industrial reds and yellows recur throughout the work because the world itself has already arranged these motifs. Snow contains warm violets and blue-gray shadows; greens fracture into dozens of temperatures; orange pipes glow against muted winter fields with accidental theatricality. One senses the artist discovering these harmonies rather than imposing them.

In this way, Powers’ sensibility recalls the poetic ethic of Pablo Neruda, particularly in Odes to Common Things, where socks, soap, bread, and chairs are granted the dignity of sustained attention. Powers and Neruda share a similar conviction that reverence emerges when you learn to look without hierarchy. These paintings embody a democratic form of attention: the belief that significance is not assigned by cultural prestige, but discovered through sustained looking. Common objects can be seen not as symbols standing in for something grander, but as presences fully deserving of encounter in themselves.

This quality of sustained presence helps explain why the paintings feel less like declarations than invitations. As writer Tamsin Smith observed, “These paintings do not lecture, they offer you a chair, a cup of coffee and a wonderful conversation about the meaning of life or that thing that happened on the way to the store. They are vital, they are real, and they are necessary in the way that friendship is. They are the subtlest form of treasure.” The warmth Smith identifies comes not from sentimentality, but from the paintings’ openness and generosity of attention. 

Powers approaches the world without hierarchy or irony; the paintings ask only that we remain with them long enough to notice how much feeling and formal complexity ordinary life already contains. Their intimacy lies in their patience. Like friendship, they accrue meaning slowly, through repeated encounters and accumulated observation rather than spectacle or persuasion.  In an era that often rewards spectacle or conceptual distance, these paintings possess the courage of direct attention. Their achievement lies not in transforming ordinary life into fantasy, but in revealing how visually mysterious ordinary life already is.