For our varied and innumerable perceptions of the world around, a scant few are recorded here by Byron Kim, Spencer Finch, Motohiro Takeda, and Louis Block. Impressions they may be, or reflections more likely. A cherry blossom falls, a branch bears its leaves for the last time, a wisp of cloud passes out of view. What remains of these moments is a feeling, a particular combination of sights or smells that recall something of time passed.

Maybe it was the criss-crossing trajectory of the petals as they tumbled through the air, held aloft, here and there, by the wind before gravity carried them downward. Maybe it was the lonely contour of a branch, bereft of its fruit and waiting, for the warmth of a new season that brings with it the tickle of sun across its spine. Maybe it was simply looking up at the sky with eyes closed, that the dance of wind and sun across your face carried with them some fond recollection of yesterday or yesteryear. Overcome by the effortless peeling back of time brought on by nothing more than a fine attunement to the liveness that surrounds, you may sit more consciously in the present, or any number of past presents. The sky too can be so many shades of blue.

“Sky blue” may be a color, yes. Colloquially that is, but not scientifically. No, sky blue is not a color so much as a memory. Another place, another mindset, another time with another person. In paintings, drawings, and sculptures, each of the artists here capture something that would have remained otherwise ineffable. But from their ruminations in color and light take shape a precious manifestation of what can only be nostalgia; a feeling not lost to time but buried in it. Under layers of a life lived, calcified by the weight of their own aggregation, smoothed over by the repeated lapping of water on rock, a mere flicker may be all that is needed, one wave refracted amongst a million rays, it takes the shortest path to you as blue.

Sky blue is a place you go.

-Hannah Sage Kay