What Art Does to You

Nobody warns you that a sculpture might make you laugh out loud. Nobody tells you that a painting can stop you cold in the middle of a gallery, without any warning, and bring tears to your eyes. We talk about art in terms of technique, medium, and subject matter. We rarely talk about what it actually does to the body when you're standing in front of something that reaches you.

At Sorrel Sky Gallery, we watch it happen every day.

Jeremy Salazar's portraits have a way of doing this that is hard to explain without having experienced it. Jeremy grew up on the Navajo reservation in Eastern New Mexico, where they still have no running water. He is a self-taught artist who began painting in 2016, and his subjects are his people. He paints faces with a precision that goes beyond technique. The eyes in a Salazar portrait hold something, a knowing, a sorrow, a dignity that collectors have described as almost unbearable in the most beautiful way. People stop. People go quiet. People cry. It is not performance. It is recognition, the sensation of seeing another human being fully witnessed.

David Yarrow's "The Manifest Destiny" works differently. Shot one cold February morning at Horseshoe Bend on the Durango and Silverton Railroad high in the San Juan Mountains, the image places a Native American on horseback in the foreground as a steam train rounds the bend behind him. It is not a confrontation. As Yarrow writes, the figure is there simply to show his presence, and it is left entirely to the viewer to imagine how the next five minutes unfolded. That open question is where the emotional weight lives. The photograph compresses an entire chapter of American history into a single frame, and collectors who stand before it often go very quiet. It is not sadness exactly. It is reckoning.

Then there is Star Liana York, who can make a room erupt in pure delight. "Peaches" stops people in their tracks for entirely different reasons. The sculpture captures that animal exuberance, a creature so completely in its own moment that joy is simply what it radiates. "Berry Bandit" does the same, mischief made permanent in bronze. And "Mares at Play" has prompted collectors to laugh with a kind of surprise, as if they forgot, just for a moment, that they were in a gallery. Star sculpts from her ranch near Abiquiu, where she rides daily, and that intimacy with animals shows in every piece. Her subjects are not posed. They are alive.

The Board Meeting, her gathering of ravens, belongs in a category of its own. Those birds, perched together with all the gravity of a corporate leadership team, tap into something deeply human: the desire to project meaning onto the creatures we live alongside. The piece is funny, and then it is something more than funny. Ravens have appeared in mythology from the Arctic to the American Southwest, as tricksters, as messengers, as the birds who carry wisdom no human language can hold. York's humor opens the door, and the symbolism walks through it.

Landscape painting works more quietly, and often more deeply. Stephen Day's canvases carry the specific light of the Southwest, that particular gold of late afternoon on red rock, the way shadow moves through canyon country. Peggy Immel brings a painter's eye trained in architecture. Her abandoned buildings and wide vistas hold solitude without loneliness. Both painters give you permission to slow down, and in slowing down, to feel something you did not expect.

Roberto Ugalde and Steve Hastings arrive with color that is purely physical. Ugalde's work pulses. Hastings builds layers that seem to generate their own heat. Neither artist invites passive viewing. The paintings demand that you respond, that you bring your whole nervous system to the surface.

Arlene LaDell Hayes works from dreams. Her paintings carry that quality of images from the unconscious, vivid and associative, pulling from symbolism that bypasses the analytical mind entirely. The color is extraordinary, purples and golds and blues that function almost as music. Collectors often say they cannot explain why a piece moves them. With Arlene's work, that is precisely the point.

What all of these artists share is this: they make work that is not content to be looked at. It insists on being felt.

We believe art's highest purpose is not decoration. It is an encounter. Come prepared to be surprised by what it does to you.

Sorrel Sky Gallery is located in Durango at 828 Main Avenue, in Santa Fe at 125 W. Palace Avenue, in SoHo at 419 West Broadway, and in East Hampton at 58 Park Place. Visit us at SorrelSky.com.