PASSAGE Opens at Gallery One
Ongoing public art project explores grief, dreaming, and hope.
What if grief and dreams could coexist? What might we discover about ourselves if we allowed sorrow to be witnessed and gave ourselves permission to imagine what comes next? Albuquerque artist Naomi Natale explores these questions in a new exhibition at Gallery One titled PASSAGE.
On view from August 31 through October 2, PASSAGE relates to Natale’s larger ongoing public art project Of Grief & Dreams, envisioned as a sanctuary for people to navigate the shores of sorrow and imagine their most sacred dreams. At the heart of the project is a metaphoric ship vessel designed to offer a place where people can gather, grieve, dream, create, and visualize a passage from one emotional landscape to another.
Rather than asking grief to disappear, Natale’s work asks what it means to live alongside it.
The project grew from Natale’s own experience of profound grief and the realization that creating alongside others can become an act of survival. In October 2021, Natale’s two-year-old son was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive cancer. Through that experience, she began to explore artmaking not only as a means of expression, but as a tangible way to move through grief and toward possibility.
“As an artist, the most healing thing I know to do is to bring something into existence that was not there before – and to do that in community,” said Natale.
When completed, participants will be invited to create artistic records of their dreams through oral testimony, photography, illustration, books, plays, films, stories, poems, or other forms of creative expression. Together these records will form an evolving archive of dreams – a repository where people can feel seen, heard, and witnessed.
The exhibition is free and open to the public from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday - Friday. Gallery One is located on the first floor of City Hall at 1 Civic Plaza NW.
Learn more Gallery One's website.