The Exhibition
“Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out alive.”
Elbert Hubbard
Between what happens to us and how we respond, there is a gap. Buddhist philosophy calls it sacred pause: the interval in which a reaction can be observed rather than simply performed.
Stuff of Thought gathers a new body of paintings by Li Montalvo that treat that interval as a subject worth painting. Through geometric abstraction, a limited palette, and hard-edge lines, the works build compositions with room in them, spaces of reflection that allow for a moment of stillness.
The exhibition extends Montalvo’s earlier inquiry into schemas, the frameworks by which past experience and cultural conditioning shape a response before we are aware of choosing it. Sacred pause breaks that pattern down. It opens a small but consequential distance between habit and choice.
On view in the Prindle Institute Northern Wing. Exhibition curated by Alex Richardson, Ph.D., Associate Director.
The Artist
Li Montalvo (they/them) is a Puerto Rican artist based in Indianapolis. They studied Visual Arts and Contemplative Psychology at Naropa University, the Buddhist-inspired liberal arts university in Boulder, Colorado, and completed graduate studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.
Montalvo paints the landscape of the psyche. Working in geometric abstraction, they are concerned with how attention, emotion, and inner experience shape the way we see and relate to the world, which they describe as the place of possibilities where reality is constructed. Their practice holds that mindfulness is what opens the gap in which deliberate action becomes possible.
Recent work has centered on schemas and, in Stuff of Thought, on sacred pause: two related accounts of how a response forms and where it can be interrupted.
In Their Words
“My work does not seek to tell a story or represent a subject. Instead, it invites presence: a direct encounter with the silent geometry of awareness itself, the stillness between automatic mental responses and conscious choice.”
Li Montalvo