Know The Ways
A solo exhibition at Flux Factory, Queens, Know The Ways is a critical exploration of colonial understandings of the frontier, as received through the abstract landscapes made by a fictionalized artist Florence Martin. In the narrative Verstappen created, Florence Martin was a virtually unknown contemporary of the Transcendentalist painting group. Martin destroyed her paintings in the late 1960s during a crisis of faith after witnessing the construction of a highway past her home. Reflecting on the complicity of transcendentalist painters in the colonization of the American west, Verstappen has recreated a collection of Martin's major works. Through these actions, Verstappen explores deep spiritual and cultural conflicts within Martin's paintings, and ultimately, the legacy of guilt and greed within settler relationships with the land.