“Do more yoga.” “Save more money.” “Call mom more often.” These guidelines may sound all too familiar around this time of year, for New Year’s Resolutions can be a beautiful thing. Whether you believe in starting the New Year with a direction in mind, or that resolutions are silly, January 1st still marks a fresh start and new possibilities. Within this context especially, Microscope Gallery’s “Detours,” where artist Anita Thacher’s exhibits her first show dedicated exclusively to painting, resonates beautifully and gives us a new perspective on what it means to follow a path.

It may sound surprising that tucked away in a little gallery behind Little Skips Coffee Shop houses Thacher’s first painting focused show. Thacher is no stranger to painting, but she is known for working with a wide variety of mediums. Through her use of sculptural installations, paint, film, light, multimedia and video to name a few, Thacher has famously explored spacial relationships and perception, both in the physical world and within her own personal experiences for decades. Take her 10-minute 1975 film “Homage to Magritte” for example. We see the artist humming happily in a home of sorts, arranging flowers and looking out a window. Behind her, a mirror reflects her actions as it would normally, until her silhouette begins to stay put when she isn’t there, or fade away when she is, disrupting our “normal” expectations of space and objects, and speaks to the ways in which our memories of events fade, become over exaggerated, or change completely.