New Mexico has abundant supplies of earth, wind, and, unfortunately, fire. Water, the last of the four elements, is a bit more scarce. Still, the Santa Fe Gallery Association artists whose work is featured in Water: Sacred Elixir , on the walls at Santa Fe Regional Airport through August 8, found plenty of ways to represent the life-sustaining liquid.
The show is presented by the gallery in tandem with the city’s Department of Arts & Culture. British cinematographer Roger Deakins’ print The Passing Storm, New Mexico shows a rainbow behind the three distinctive crosses at San Jose de Armijo Cemetery in Albuquerque. Santa Fe gallery owner Blair Vaughn-Gruler’s contemporary painting Evidence of Water is a swirl of various hues of blue.
Santa Fe-based aerial artist Warren Keating’s painting Summer Dreaming of Water’s Embrace shows a girl relaxing in an inner tube, surrounded by green water. The late Santa Fe artist John Nieto’s (1936-2018) contemporary painting Mesa Encantada shows a woman at the water’s edge, mesas rising in the distance behind her. The gallery association is producing a series of shows at the airport; they are separate from Navajo Nation muralist Ehren Kee Natay’s concurrent showing of his piece Shiprock at Dusk there (see “On the fly,” June 14).
“In Santa Fe, I think, it’s really important to give the impression that you’re arriving at a fine-art destination,” says Lisa Keating, curator of Water: Sacred Elixir and executive director.
