Mayme Kratz: To Know the Dark

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Mayme Kratz To Know the Dark October 1–31, 2026 Opening reception: Thursday, October 1, 5:30–7:30 pm Dolby Chadwick Gallery is thrilled to announce To Know the Dark, an exhibition of recent work by Mayme Kratz, on view October 1–31, 2026. For more than three decades, Kratz has transformed overlooked remnants of the natural world into luminous meditations on beauty, time, and renewal. Seedpods, branches, animal bones, and other organic materials—gathered in and around her home in Phoenix, Arizona, and during countless wanderings through the desert—are carefully arranged and suspended within layers of colored resin. Kratz does not collect indiscriminately. Certain discoveries, she explains, possess a kind of vibration, awakening memory or longing before finding their place in the studio. Sanded to a smooth, matte finish, these works invite slow, attentive looking. Familiar botanical forms dissolve into glimmering galaxies, nocturnal gardens, and otherworldly landscapes, while fragments of once-living things are not simply preserved but transfigured, their fragility acquiring new resonance. TThe exhibition takes its title from Wendell Berry’s poem “To Know the Dark,” which explores darkness not merely as the absence of light but as a condition through which new ways of seeing become possible. Kratz has been drawn to the mysteries of darkness since childhood. She recalls lying quietly in shelters she built among pine needles, watching dusk settle over the landscape as insects…