Cliff Notes
Each week, our regional Cliff Notes columnists Christine Miller, Rachel Elizabeth Jones, Sam Hiura, and Nia-Amina Minor pick the most exciting events and exhibitions on the West Coast. BUT this week we had a scheduling conflict, so VW Associate Editor Ella Ray is popping in with some picks from Oregon.
Soleé Darrell: Where You Need To Be: Teleportation Studies
pt. 2, Oakland, CA
June 1 to July 13, 2024
I had serious fomo when my dear friend and co-conspirator Vanessa Perez Winder posted images of Soleé Darrell’s solo exhibition Where You Need To Be: Teleportation Studies. Even through my phone screen, Darrell’s dye on silk works have a potent presence, stirring in me a desire to think about materiality and to listen to Journey in Satchidananda.
The artist’s abstract, yet methodical mark-making in aubergine, moss green, clementine, inky black, and fuschia illustrate a tempo that reads akin to the body—think breathwork, heartbeats, stims. Maybe it’s how Darrell’s hand is present in the splotches, furls, and washes, all of which read as rhythmic impressions of an artistic process, but I can’t help but want to put my ears near the canvas in an attempt to catch a low hum or vibration.
Darrell is quoted saying that she wants to “bring you back into your body and shoot you into space at the same time.” This hallucinatory artistic goal is evident throughout the exhibition, setting us up for an embodied encounter with abstraction.
Reflection: Where do you want to be right now?
Amy Bay, Shiela Laufer, Sherise Lee, & Anya Roberts-Toney: A PLACE BETWEEN
La Loma Projects Annex, Pasadena, CA (By appointment only)
June 23 to August 4, 2024
Paintings of flowers will never be played out to me. If floral paintings have no fans, I am dead (lol).
Amy Bay’s contributions to the group exhibition A PLACE BETWEEN push the pastoral archetype of flower paintings to its limit. Bay’s florals are marshy and imperfect—the flat background colors peek through the foregrounded buds and stems, creating a collage-like effect that makes apparent the artist’s layered approach to handling her medium and this subject. These oil and wax works have a preserved quality to them. The surface texture reminds me of plastic flowers from the craft store, a kind of frozen facsimile, but Bay’s use of overcast colors injects the passage of time into her scenes. The ideological and formal tension between living-breathing-rotting blossoms and preserved fabrications reveals how thrilling floral art can be.
Reflection: What is your relationship to flowers?