Fight Flight Freeze – a New Year exhibition

Fight Flight Freeze, an exhibition by artists Jay Allen and Katy Carter, is a visual conversation between the two artists. They explore the nature of experience of trauma, sited in the body as a felt experience, and the creative expression of their individual curiosities into this realm. This thoughtful and thought-provoking exhibition challenges and rewards.

Jay Allen’s sharply rendered prints and line drawings depict fascinations with all winged things, feather, fur and skin. They obsessively seek solace in deep observation colliding with quirky humour in the inky shadows.

Katy Carter’s luscious fluid abstract acrylics ebb and flow between exploding and imploding, blossoming and dissolving. These topographies of trauma invoke the energetic exchange between the macrocosm and microcosm, the inner and outer landscapes of our existence.

While one artist grapples to confront and quell the demons of the darkest night, the other endeavours to surrender control to the medium. Both taste moments of liberation in this process.

In this collection Jay Allen combines the fine detail of line drawing with drypoint, gelle printing, charcoal and ink.

“My work simultaneously explores the transient fragility of natural beauty in the process of decomposition, with the visceral reactions of the living body under stress,” says Jay. “The frantic states of flight and freeze, the reactions and adaptation of beings under tension, from outside and from within. Fleeting glimpses of resilience, hope and the instinct to survive, thread through subtly shifting landscapes of dying plant forms. Inevitable acceptance, or perhaps decay.”

Katy Carter, who predominantly paints in abstract acrylics, was inspired to explore something more fluid and spontaneous for this series.

“Experimenting with acrylic pouring #fluidart, I discovered that the fluid process allows my more energetic freedom and spontaneity to express a confluence of thematic influences and curiosities,” says Katy. “My deep fondness of colour, harmony, movement, inspiration from the natural world from the micro to the macro, and the beauty in the unexpected, have all coincided to produce this work.”

Underpinning the works lie the intersectional pathways that have preoccupied Katy for some years; spiritual enquiry into the nature of self, embodied emotional intelligence, and the internal experience and external wrestle between repression/expression of trauma.

n Fight Flight Freeze runs from 10am to 3pm daily from Friday 31 December to midday on Wednesday 12 January. The Mangawhai Artists Gallery is located at 45 Moir St, next to the Library Hall, in Mangawhai Village.

Jay Allen and Katy Carter combine for a ‘visual conversation’.