Ellen Chuse
Blue Totem, 2025
440 Gallery is pleased to present an online exhibition curated by gallery member Juliet Martin. Of the exhibition, she writes:
"I asked a first date his favorite color. He said 'midnight blue'. Suddenly, my favorite color was 'midnight blue', though the date didn't go anywhere. Blue is an atmosphere, an emotion, a symbol, a story. The group exhibition, 'I'm So Blue', becomes the lens through which each artist explores their own relationship to feeling, memory, space, and perception. These works reflect the many lives of blue: from the celestial to the intimate, the joyful to the mournful.
Blue soothes and provokes, expands and isolates. It carries the weight of oceans and skies, the fragility of bruises and porcelain. Each artist engages with blue as both subject and metaphor.
How can a single color hold so many contradictions? What lives in the shadows of blue - and what kind of light does it cast?
Together, these works offer a reflection on the emotion and symbolic depths of blue.