JOAN PEARSON
NOT LIKE EDEN
Let’s Share, If You Dare, pastel on sanded Mi - Tientes paper 11”x 14”
APRIL 11 - MAY 3
Joan Pearson’s Not Like Eden, engages the richly layered and symbolically charged terrain of pre- and postlapsarian imagery—innocence poised before rupture. Rooted in Old Testament depictions of the Fall from Grace, her playful pastel works combine precision with atmospheric softness, reinterpreting these narratives through a visual language that recalls the luminous, velvet-like surfaces of late 19th-century Post-Impressionist painting, where form and ambiguity coexist.
I Guess… Leap of Faith, pastel on Mi-Tientes paper 11” x 14”
Traditional Edenic imagery is reimagined through surreal impressionistic visions of idyllic, seemingly utopian, landscapes that harbor a persistent, lurking unease. The ‘serpent’ and ‘Adam and Eve’ appear in shifting guises, one tempting the other towards imminent fallibility.
Echoing Samuel Beckett’s words — “a place with no way in, no way out, a safe place not like Eden”—this exhibition reflects on the paradox of sanctuary and exile, and the fragile boundary between innocence and experience.
He’s Come Back Ferdinand, pastel on sanded Mi-Tientes paper 11” x 14”