Deep in the Heart of Summer

Detail, Dream from Seaside Houses, Chantel Foretich, 2022
Deep in the Heart of Summer
An exhibition of mechanized, illuminated sculptures inspired by literature

by Chantel Foretich

August 5 – September 2, 2022

Opening Reception August 5, 4 – 6 pm

Satin Reichman Memorial Art Gallery

Drawing from scenes and passages in fiction by mostly American authors from the 1930s through the 1950s, the works are small in scale and similar to earlier works that are versions of real, recalled, and literary places. These shrunken spaces are charged in some way, constructed because of their accumulated history, fleeting exchange, idea, offer of respite, or role in violence.  Each can be thought of as a constructed relic, almost small enough to imagine inside a human body, sized in the same way that memories recede, but fill the body upon recollection.

I am especially excited to share these works with fellow readers and lovers of the Santa Fe Public Library!

Books referenced include The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers, Tortilla Flats and other works by John Steinbeck, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, Seaside Houses, Falconer and other works by John Cheever, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Invisible Man by Ralph Waldo Ellison, and The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall. I am thankful for recent scholarship presented in My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland.

The title of the novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is based on a line from Fiona Macleod’s poem, The Lonely Hunter in the book the Hills of Dreams:

… “Deep in the heart of Summer, sweet is life to me still,
But my heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill.”

https://www.chantelforetich.work/