As part of a series on artist-curators, Sharon Butler blogs about the exhibition The escape from the banal of everyday life to the world of the ideal, curated by Brooke Moyse, at NURTUREart, Brooklyn, on view through November 30, 2012.

Butler writes: "Presenting uncharacteristic work by abstract artists Jonathan Allmeier, Tamara Gonzales, EJ Hauser, Stephen Truax, and Maria Walker that is conceptual, formal, and sincere all at once, Moyse is interested in the objects' history, the mark-making, and the way that the artists combine the two to create powerful new experiences, linking the 19th-century Symbolist movement, mysticism, and transcendental experience to recent approaches in contemporary abstract painting."