ArtYard is pleased to announce new exhibitions, Living in Brilliant Suspension: Didier William and Deep Seated: Chairs and the Stories They Tell, open with a reception from 6 to 8 PM on Saturday, Oct. 18. The evening also marks the opening of Bernadette Simone: I Love My Condo, a collaborative exhibition between ArtYard and Studio Route 29.
In addition to the opening reception, the public is invited to attend a gallery walk with Deep Seated Curator Clare Dolan at 11 AM on Sunday, Oct. 19, followed by an artist talk with Living in Brilliant Suspension Curator Jerry Philogene, and artist Didier William.
Living in Brilliant Suspension: Didier William
In Living in Brilliant Suspension (Viv pandye nan briyans), the multidisciplinary artist Didier William explores the relationships between the body, the ground, the land, and guarded memories and histories. William’s paintings are complex composites that blend the mediums and techniques of painting, drawing, printmaking, collage, and woodcarving.
Expounding upon the immigrant experience and the kinetic life of displaced people, William’s works explore such spaces, capturing generational connections and memories in part through their vibrant and brilliant textures and materiality, their distinctive painted surfaces as poignant as they are aesthetically riveting. His large-scale mixed media paintings are populated with heroic, Rubenesque bodies that unapologetically refuse gender definition or to be tethered to the ground. They are suspended in the air as if in flight or poised to enter another realm of being.
Philogene and William will host an artist talk at 12 PM on Sunday, Oct. 19. The pair return for an talk with scholar Anna Arabindan-Kesson at 6 PM on Thursday, Nov. 13 and a screening of a special edition of the upcoming documentary SAN GADE DYE, an artist portrait of William, followed by a conversation with filmmaker and Emmy Award-winning producer and director Marlon Johnson at 3 PM on Saturday, Jan. 17.
Deep Seated: Chairs & the Stories They Tell
Deep Seated: Chairs & the Stories They Tell explores chairs, ancient furniture still ubiquitous today. Responding directly to human anatomy and our need for rest and repose, the chair also resonates with a multiplicity of connotations. Chairs enable us, punish us, connect us, elevate us, isolate us, and appear as rich symbols in dreams, fairy tales, and religious myths.
Instead of representations of chairs – paintings, prints, sculptures, films, or images in which chairs are a central element – Deep Seated explores chairs as artifacts, objects, and the stories they carry with them.
Curated by Dolan, Deep Seated is a project of the Museum of Everyday Life, Vermont-based museum dedicated to the slow-motion cataloging of life via ordinary objects of no monetary value, yet immense consequence. A puppeteer with the Bread and Puppet Theater for decades who founded the Museum in 2010, Dolan is a painter, director, performer, curator, and intensive care unit nurse living in Northeast Vermont
A gallery walk with Dolan is at 11 AM on Sunday, Oct. 19.
Bernadette Simone: I Love My Condo
In I Love My Condo, Bernadette Simone coalesces her most cherished spaces, feelings, and ways of living into repeated symbols, all rendered in the glow of “forever” (a tense that’s very important to her) in highly chromatic depictions of the condominium she lives in, surrounded by friends, flowers, music, and trees. The radiance of her thickly applied pastels lends these scenes a playful joyousness – days are fair, food is good, friends love us, and shining song and color wash over it all. Simone is a Milford-based artist working at Studio Route 29.
Onerva Luoma: Lead Me out of here
Also on view is Onerva Luoma: Lead Me out of here (even if I Do not Know if such a Place Exists), a conceptual exhibition consisting of paintings made on clothes. The work explores what a meaningful relationship with clothing might look like in an environmental catastrophe and how we might see clothes as something more than commodities, objects to be bought and sold. Visitors may borrow garments from the Clothing Library for up to a week at a time.
