TELL ME OF THE TWISTED HORN: The Art and Process of Rebecca Norton is an exploration into how lived experience shapes us, and continues to shape us for years. When Norton was a young adult, she lost a dear friend, a once lover, a fellow seeker of knowledge and experience. That loss and the twenty years of living and reflection continue to influence and impact how Norton reads stories, the imagery that she is drawn to, and the connections she creates in her artwork.

With this exhibition, we sought to share the beautiful, messy, complex experience of synthesizing a life well-lived, into art. The connections are not always linear; the imagery might seem unrelated, but the art, just like life, continues to grow, to change, to morph based on how the artist grows, changes, morphs.

The artistic process does not come to completion at the end of a project. For Norton, art is the process of continually evolving, accumulating, and integrating new information, reviewing old memories, and searching out new stories and myths. Even when an artistic project “concludes”, the mind continues to think, sort, categorize, find patterns, build meaning, connect to archetypes and stories and rumors and mysteries that speak to her. An artist’s work is never done.

In this exhibition, the main wall holds a constellation of paintings including a swirling mass of black unicorns, spinning and spinning into a vortex that holds and consumes all in its vicinity.  Pendulums marking time frame either side of the swirling equine figures, their movement frozen in a moment, glittering fractals reflecting and absorbing light in varying proportions. At the bottom-center, another canvas frames the fantastical figures, a building wave, the crest of a whirlpool, the powerful force of water impossible to contain in one image.

The images on the surrounding walls in the exhibition are pulled from the artist’s studio: works in progress, concept sketches, remainders of past projects, Disney princess coloring book drawings from her daughter, plants, sketchbooks, and notably, drawings and reference images of the narwhal. What seems like a mythical creature–like the unicorn–is, in fact, very real. The narwhals’ horn is twisted; opposing, swirling grooves encircle the horn from base to tip, allowing the horn to grow straight and up to 8-10 feet in length. While scientists know how the horn grows, there is no definitive answer to the horn’s biological purpose. They remain mysterious, ethereal creatures of both reality and fantasy. Narwhals have special significance to Norton; it was in the region where narwhals summer, the sheltered coastal bays and fjords of the arctic circle, where her friend was lost in a mountaineering accident. She envisions him transformed, his spirit becoming one with that landscape; from the tides, to the seas, to the creatures that swim and become myths.

Huge thank you to Aaron Raymer for your help with installation and your ingenuity and mechanical prowess and to Patrick Masterson for the gorgeous, letterpress exhibition posters.