What a joy to be brought into the studio of Teri Hackett, to see her huge, large, mid-size and small hand-held art, all exuding a feeling of mythical scale made contemporary. In her current series, the focus of each painting hovers within an empty raw-canvas frame, becoming a painting within a painting, suggesting an event where time disappears into an unknown future, where environmental chaos has destroyed much of earth’s life but where trees, sky and clouds still desperately cry out to the night stars of eternity, pleading to survive. This visual and conceptual sense of the unstable is balanced – always balanced – by happy colors of pinks against blues and greens grounded by earth tones, along with playful globular shapes, and gorgeous textures and patterns created by acrylic paint, rope, globs of plaster-like gesso, cloth, markers, coffee, photos, resin, diatomaceous earth, etc. In fact, Teri’s love of materials relates to her love of experimentation, to pushing a painting beyond itself, of asking “What exactly is a painting?” and “Where does a painting’s space end?” I was lucky to be shown earlier work too, where Teri’s life-long query into the 3-dimensional possibilities of painting began, for instance by breaking holes into the canvas surface, or controlling the gallery installation so that paintings protruded diagonally off the wall or rocks and bricks continued on to the floor. Teri also showed me her Siena sketchbooks, a collection of colored marker drawings that flowed out from her walks during an Italian artist residency, a series of vibrant colored-maker notations of place, memory, shape, color and light. Though not directly, clearly these – and other – sketches feed into her larger work, helping to give substance to the imagined pastoral landscapes she couches within a carefully constructed abstraction. In these imagined landscapes, Teri plays with incongruity: physical and painterly space; astrological time and painterly time; materials as descriptive illusion and earthly substance; the lyrical and philosophical. Yet miraculously, each piece is unified and glows.