Join us on the last day to view "Mise en Abyme," featuring Rachel Pontious latest series of paintings WSG DJ set by LADYLIKE from 2-5PM.

"Mise en Abyme," meaning “placed into the abyss” is Rachel Pontious’ debut solo exhibition featuring her latest series of paintings that use the sevens of the Tarot as its starting point. Her use of tarot references both searching and questioning as a way of knowing, and as a result, the paintings represent a personal embodied experience of the cards.

Tarot cards have been used as symbolic tournaments, theological explorations, mathematical systems, and divination tools but aesthetically, they mirror the time and place they came from. Using this historicity to guide her work, she creates new images that expand on the interpretations of specific cards that hold meaning to her. In her accompanying zine, Pontious describes how the paintings take various perspectives on the same idea, holding multiple, even sometimes contradictory, vantage points simultaneously.

The mise en abyme device is a play of signifiers within a work, works within works that mirror one another, potentially attaining a level where meaning becomes unstable and, in this respect, may be seen as part of the process of deconstruction. This instability is where the work is most fruitful, not as an illustration of the cards, but an homage to the rich history of Tarot while bringing us into her world of rumination, contemplation, and possibilities of personal evolution.

Rachel Pontious is a fine artist currently based in Detroit, Michigan. She uses paint to explore nonlinear narratives that speak to the ways we relate to one another, to the objects around us, and to the spaces we inhabit. She does this by weaving abstracted and unnavigable spaces with figures and objects of different planes and perspectives. Her work investigates the Venn diagram of what objects we keep close and the personal mythologies that they create, subtle and exaggerated modes of communication (e.g. body language and theatricality), as well as threshold/transitional architectural spaces and portals.

She has a Master of Fine Arts from Cranbrook Academy of Art (2017) and Bachelor of Fine Arts from School of Visual Arts (2011). She is a recipient of the PLAYGROUND DETROIT 20/20 Emerging Artists Fellowship award in 2020 and in 2019, she received a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship and Residency. Her work has been exhibited at White Brick Gallery, Tessellate Gallery, Roy G Biv Gallery, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Ann Arbor Art Center and more.

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