SECRIST | BEACH is pleased to announce its debut solo presentation with Chicago-based artist Jacqueline Surdell: The Conversion: Rings, Rupture, and the Forest Archive. On view will be a suite of new monumental wall-based fiber landscapes created through knotted textile forms. This exhibition is presented in conjunction with Natura Non Constristatur, an invitational survey featuring 11 artists co-organized with Jacqueline Surdell. In addition, the gallery’s salon space will feature a site-specific installation, titled Lumen Reliquary, created by Andee Hess of Osmose Design (Portland, OR) inspired by the concurrent exhibitions.

The Conversion: Rings, Rupture, and the Forest Archive is a deeply personal ode to the mystical, visceral and illusory nature of forests. In tracing the psychic and physical imprints of history, memory, and myth within this environment, the forest is presented not as a backdrop, but a contemporaneous reliquary. Influenced by Jungian archetypes, feminist storytelling, and environmental histories, her landscapes suggest the invisible threads that link generations—through blood, myth, trauma, and resilience. In this space, memory is not fixed; it mutates, deepens, and expands.

Jacqueline Surdell engages the forest as both witness and participant in human history. Industrial materials—rope, netting, and mesh—are twisted and suspended into dense, sprawling configurations that evoke wounds, altars, ecosystems and topographies. Techniques inspired by friendship bracelets infuse the work with intimacy and care, transforming utilitarian tools of labor and survival into gestures of connection and devotion.

Throughout Surdell’s weavings are images of historically relevant images printed on sheets of fabric, cut into strips and woven into the artworks. Included here are images of paintings of The Garden of Eden by Jan Brueghel the Elder (1610-1612) and Thomas Cole (1828) which underscore the passage of time and the impermanence of paradise. Renditions of The Conversion of Saul (the biblical transformation of Saul into Paul) by Guido Reni, Jérôme Cartellier and Luca Giordano – alluding to the sublime and spiritual upheaval. Archival photographs from the Battle of the Bulge, juxtaposed with augmented images of the contemporary Ardennes forest, serve as historical and environmental references. This process of deconstruction and reconstruction brings an interdisciplinary approach that weaves together biblical narratives, pastoral scenes, natural landscapes, and architectural forms, resulting in a deeply personal and multifaceted experience.

Drawing from religious imagery, pastoral landscapes, and forest surveys, Surdell reimagines the forest not as a resolved metaphor but as a site of transformation and transcendence. These artworks represent a complex moment representing both exile and of vision, where the sacred and the haunted coexist. They hold space for contradiction—grief and joy, violence and tenderness, play and survival—all in flux.

In tandem with the spiritual components of Surdell’s textiles are formative moments related to the temporal. These are aspects within the artwork concerned with time, an earthly life and exploring secular approaches to understanding how trees can represent these components in ways that lay bare shared realities. As a tree holds its own secrets within each ring of the trunk, the indifference with which it grows marks the steady pace of time and life. The forest holds and records this time collectively, without judgement, in defiance of the upticks and downturns of humanity’s struggle with empathy and achievement.

Underlying the spiritual and terrestrial elements of the artwork on view is the charged resonance of a single date: January 25. This day marks the artist’s birth and the unknown moment of Surdell’s great-uncle Paul’s death in the war-torn woods of Europe during the infamous Battle of the Bulge in 1945 near the end of World War II. This personal and inherited connection explores the enduring psychological and environmental impacts of war through the lens of landscape—specifically the forest as a symbolic site of memory and mythology.

IMAGE: Cloudscape: She Paused, Peering Through the Veil, 2025 (detail), 2025. Nylon cord, cotton cord, polyester fabric, steel, 51 x 76 x 13 inches.

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Tags: Jacqueline Surdell, Secrist | Beach, The Conversion: Rings Rupture and the Forest Archive, West Town