Friday, November 15, 2019 at 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Samuel Owen Gallery
382 Greenwich Ave
Greenwich, CT 06830
You are invited to meet the artist James Verbicky at a cocktail reception and see his latest body of new works.
“Peace Portal”
Freedom and wholeness are what all beings seek. But we are closed in by invisible political and social walls. As a person born in Canada, freedom took the form of a Green card. Early in my life, I used the border crossing from Canada into the US called “Peace Arch”, known by locals as “Peace Portal”. The place represented a flurry of conflicting emotions. Excitement, anxiety, danger. Would I be allowed to pass? Would I be welcomed into the US, or turned away? The flippant decisions of border guards affected my life profoundly, and my ability to make a living as an artist. Strangers held my fate in their hands. This reality causes a deep vulnerability to grow in a person, one that to this day still affects my daily work and my worldview.
When I received legal documentation in the form of an Extraordinary Ability Green Card years later, I no longer feared crossing and “Peace Portal” took on new meaning. I was free to move anywhere I chose, in a way that many people take for granted. I certainly never will lose respect for this privilege. As a result of this decades-long struggle, the yearning for freedom appears in my work often, in language and in my use of the circle as a symbol for wholeness and what all beings strive for: to be in control of their own existence.