Barbara Earl Thomas

"With the artworks brought together in Barbara Earl Thomas: The Illuminated Body, the artist focuses on the body in order to convey how light and shadow trigger a visual experience and to explore how we communicate who we are as well as our intentions to one another. In one sense, this exploration is highly personal: "As a Black person, I can't help but see myself in the landscape and imagine how others might experience me based on how I appear to them. I search myself to see how I react to and employ my thoughts and opinions because, aside from being Black, I'm also human and subject to the world's influences." In another sense, Thomas's latest works seek to express not just the physical but also the metaphysical and metaphorical, the profound and intangible: what is within, what is beyond the sight of our eyes"--