Ashland artist Rachel Hallett Ralston hosts a gallery party at Langford Gallery in Phoenix

By Art Van Kraft for Ashland.news

Ashland artist Rachel Hallett Ralston will host a gallery party Saturday, March 15, at Langford Gallery in Phoenix. Ralston will address the group in a talk on the creative process she has experienced in her work and showcase a variety of different art works on exhibit. 

Ralston describes herself as multidisciplinary artist and curator whose says her work “bridges the realms of painting, and cultural ritual.” Based in Ashland,  her practice is described as “the tension between wildness and refinement, instinct and transformation capturing visceral landscapes both internal and external.” 

“My work is an exploration of perception — how we experience the world not as fixed, but as something alive, shifting, and shaped by attention,” Ralson said.

“I paint as a way of listening, following the movement of color and form as it unfolds. Each brushstroke is a moment of exploration, a record of meeting the unknown. In ‘Feral Grace,’ I explore the tension between wildness and refinement, instinct and structure,” she added. 

According to Ralston, the process itself is just as important as the finished work, “it is a practice of surrender, allowing the act of creation to mirror subjective experience,” she said.

She said her paintings exist in the space between, where abstraction meets figuration, where wild energy undulates into form and the formless. 

 “Throughout the exhibition, I will be painting live in the space, blurring the boundary between artist and viewer, between art and process. This is not just a show — it is a conversation, an unfolding, an invitation to step into the unknown and witness creation as it happens,” Ralston said. 

Beyond the canvas, Ralston has shaped participatory art at Lightning in a Bottle, Symbiosis, Oregon Eclipse, and The Temple at Renegade Burn in what she calls “expanding the role of art as a sacred and communal experience.”

As the founder of Hobo Nouveau, an experimental storefront and gallery in Berkeley, she is credited with creating  a living salon, “blending historical artifacts with contemporary artistic expression.”

Influenced by her bohemian upbringing in the antique world, Ralston defines her work as, “reimagining the relationships with self, sensuality and the nature of consciousness, engaging in the co-creation of emergent culture.”

Art Van Kraft is an artist living in Ashland and a former broadcast journalist and news director of a Los Angeles-area National Public Radio affiliate. Email him at artukraft@msn.com.