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The Arts Intel Report

Sky Glabush: The letters of this alphabet were trees

Sky Glabush, Firelight in pine forest, 2024.

Sept 5 – Oct 17, 2024
54 Franklin St, New York, NY 10013

Sky Glabush’s debut exhibition in New York City takes its title from a line in Seamus Heaney’s poem “Alphabets,” which conjures a form of writing not found in the classroom. “And he left the Latin forum for the shade / Of new calligraphy that felt like home. / The letters of this alphabet were trees. / The capitals were orchards in full bloom, / The lines of script like briars coiled in ditches.” Born in 1970 in Alert Bay, British Columbia, Glabush is a painter, sculptor, and potter, a Baháʼí, and an associate professor of visual art. He lives near London, Ontario, in the countryside. The paintings in this show are landscapes in oil and sand on canvas, large and stylized in deep arts-and-crafts colors. Some of them—Night Road (2023) and Star and coronal and bell (2023)—suggest the work of a mystic, a vision in full bloom. —Laura Jacobs

Photo courtesy of Sky Glabush / Stephen Friedman Gallery