/// S P R I N G ///
Tyler Weeks
JUNE 21 - AUG 9, 2026
Opening reception : June 21, 10am-1pm
Hours Posted Weekly @Warrenartmuseum or by appointment
Poem by Lee Rae Walsh
Spring, as in springing, as in how everything has been wrapped up and within earth and us and goes ‘WhhhhaaaaAmmMmm,’ or – springing, as in wellspring, as in gushing. Dirt that smells like you want to eat it. Get quenched by all the color that goes --
Somethin’ a little sonic, dank. Spring as in the Church of the seasons, stained glass window through blurry sleepy eyes coming out of the dark time.The pattern of a kitsch lawn chair cushion on a screened in porch -– wafting a bit of acidic dampness as its aired in sun between soaks. The wet mouth of spring opening soft electric. Spring sacks bowing in the rain over prickly leg hairs freed from woolie socks.
Falling (or springing) wide open as in collapsing open as in splayed, the gray heating up and peeling. Giving way to choir vocals weakly wheezing from the wet mouth as in the exhale. It’s all coming, we are coming. Knocking the caked mud off our boots, sloughing. We subtle ferns. Going ‘boing!’…uncurling our fingers from their mitten fists, slapping leaves about. Naive finger gestures, unthawing a dot dot dot . . .
Impressions of grass on our backs, exhausted by how sprung. Faces and aluminum wheels lit all differently by the light bouncing off green. Carrot hair parsley. Chartreuse piss. Moaning ochre. Magnolia blossom center: the color of longing. Almost violent to imagine anything mechanical in this observation. Lingering stunned-halted by bonnets blue slicing up the scape. Hazy, as if we almost forgot how to gather, we start calling one another again: come running. Easel in tow.
*****
“O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts!” – Keats
There is something so comfortably, pleasurably forward about the inaugural exhibition at WAM. I think about how ‘landscape paintings’ often feel extractive. How the intellectual scaffolding of observation and mark making can quickly become so embarrassingly removed from a kind of humanness -- from vulnerability. From tender, simple acts. From the humble gift it is to witness, any of it, at all. And to do so, or practice doing so, together.
I recently passed through the museum in Maine, staying in the cozy studio above the barn. I know those pink lady slippers south of the porch. I’ve lopped invasive trees and pulled weeds from that dirt. I’ve sipped punch full of mint cut from the corner grasses just in front of where my car was parked.
Here, the scaffolding of ‘exhibition’ is undressed. It is relational. It is not void of delicious layers of meaning and intellectual song, or rather: the song is about that undressing. Or re-addressing. It carries a collaborative spirit. It all happened here. An invitation to look. To be inside and outside. Inside a painting. Outside in the landscape. Inside a community, outside of a mutant brain that wants to complicate it all. See the painting before it was a painting. The yummy yolk of an egg from one of the hens. That is this. A golden center, beginning. Spring, after all, undresses us, unfurls us, wakes us up. Allison, Ryan, Tyler, doing our waking. Open the curtains, WhhhhaaaaAmmMmm! Spring!