Jaclyn Conley, Communards Under The Stars, 2023

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oil on linen

diptych, each panel: 150x250 cm
Overall: 150 x 500 cm - 59 x 196 7/8 in

“There is a time for some things, and a time for all things; a time for great things, and a time for small things.” Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote de...

“There is a time for some things, and a time for all things; a time for great things, and a time for small things.”
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615), Part II (1615), Book III, Ch. 35.

I began this composition as I often do: layering disparate stories together and opening space for us to inhabit. Here two historic narratives which pit reality against the quest for the beautiful and just.

I became fascinated with the lore surrounding the levitation of the pentagon in 1967. The absurdist and improbable feat was spurred on by a belief of moral rightness and imagination as a group of yippies and hippies set out to exorcize the center of America’s military power in order to end the war in Vietnam.
In imagining this scenario I’ve inhabited the painting “Don Quichotte et Sancho Panza” by Honore Daumier with figures from a very different time and place but a shared illustration of storytelling and a quest for the impossible. As fellow heroic actors, the figures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are represented as both sculptures and roaming characters (re)entering the landscape of Daumier’s design.

Flags and banners through the horizon hearken back to chivalric nostalgia and the quest for what is virtuous and good. Alongside these characters counter-culture figures from the 1960s and 1970s hold the foreground. Rather than depict the levitating pentagon structure, figures gaze upwards, casting spells onto an unseen target while a group works together to set a large balloon aflight.

In both fantastic stories fact and fiction give rise to a notion of possibility even amidst absurdity.

Jaclyn Conley Canada, b. 1979

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Jaclyn Conley Canada, b. 1979