In The House and the Forest, artist and curator Janice McNab constructs an image ecosystem where each artwork modifies the reading of the others and each room alters the meaning of the next, generating an exhibition that is more than the sum of individual presences and has become a living organism.

McNab has avoided illustrative representations of our ecological crisis and there are no images of denunciation, or explicit narratives of environmental disaster. What appears is something more complex: the perception that imagery itself has begun to change because the world that fed it has also mutated.

Skies, birds, shadows, vegetation, and architectural forms cease to obey the laws of objective description and begin to configure a dreamlike geography that allows us to observe what the everyday gaze can no longer perceive. There is a surrealist drift in McNab’s own paintings and we also see it here, in a world not abandoned but seen as a reality that possesses more layers than reason usually recognizes.

Dreaming as it ceases to be an escape and becomes an especially intense form of knowledge.

Fernando Gomez de la Cuesta