Rain Cabinet The Phoenix Gallery, Waterbury Vermont October 23-December 31 , 2025
The Phoenix Gallery
5 Stowe Street
Waterbury, Vermont
October 23-December 31
2025
RAIN CABINET
A cabinet can be used to hide things you don’t want to see or showcase those you do. I often imagine the shallow volume of space between the wall and the picture plane as cabinet-like. I wonder what the painting contains, hides, or reveals in its compressed visual volume. The paintings of others I most love contain evidence of their own construction. Scarifications of the surface and layered additions and erasures show the painter responding to change, taking detours, or tuning the edges of things until they “feel right” (or deliberately wrong). I use shaped and overlaid paintings to work with partial or contingent points of view—of seeing one thing in terms of another. Stacks, folds, fissures, and edges, signal flags, anatomical diagrams, wind maps, and outdoor gear, plus natural elements—rain, ice, water, air, fire—all have human and environmental implications, where things are not always what they seem, messages are not always received, and perspectives are negotiated, occluded, or revealed.
Steve Budington – October 2025
CURATOR'S STATEMENT
Synesthesia is not merely the phenomenon of hearing sound as color. It can encompass any experience where stimulation of one sensory pathway leads to involuntary experiences in another. The violinist Itzhak Perlman sees sound as shapes: "I would say that if you play a D on the G string, for me that's round." Even math can light up in the creative mind--when the physicist Richard Feynman would contemplate physics equations he saw the n's in his head as violet blue and his x's as dark brown.
To say this collection of paintings by Steve Budington, curated under the title "Rain Cabinet," causes an involuntary chain reaction of the senses is an understatement. We can rightly call these paintings, but "intra-pictorial objects" brings it nearer. For within each painted art object we find lots of reaction-relationships--our eyes are led from one plane to the next, provoking new responses related to what's under, over or behind. There are oppositional analogies--an abstracted window pane, usually offering us a vista, here in "sky frame" is opaque; mysteriously, irksomely blocking what the other canvas is offering, stubbornly giving us nothing but matte ocean blue. Philosophically, emotionally, we are meant to squirm. But there is also delight in the pattered and calm yellows and blues that cascade effortlessly across and over the backing canvas. Maybe behind/beyond/within an obstacle is a promise of a kind of peace? The relationships between pictures in other paintings feels more like an effortless collaboration--in "the chambers and the forest light" the blue biomorphic chambers somehow comport with the abstract depiction of how forest light sometimes feels--electric!--just as the shadowy fungal forest floor exists simultaneously with the dazzling light from the canopy above. It is ultimately these kinds of "in the pocket" (to use a musical term) relationships between real and imagined environments, whether internal and emotional or external and colluded, that make this show sound, feel, and look so luminously right.
--Joseph Pensak