Monya Rowe Gallery is happy to announce a two-person exhibition of recent work by Lacey Black and Aubrey Levinthal titled Each day Nights. The title of the exhibition is borrowed from an Emily Dickinson poem that explores the need to protect the “excellent dream”, a metaphor for embracing the factor of shock and uncertainty. The poem explores the connection between the perceived and precise: internal and outer, content material and uncomfortable. Though working in very other ways, Lacey Black and Aubrey Levinthal, are each involved with exploring the passing of time and altering realities. Largely autobiographical, and emotionally layered, the works on this exhibition discover the very fact of existence.
Lacey Black’s work incorporate private, fictitious and historic imagery. The work are rooted in figuration, but dance with lyricism, abstraction and surrealism. Black likens the work to “vessels” which maintain photographs, colours, textures, concepts, and experiences.* The work is intentionally unexplainable at instances, virtually otherworldly. Though the works can seem fantastical, they’re very a lot formed by lived experiences. A number of the characters within the playful procession depicted in Parade of Incarnations (2024) embody relations, a drag queen from RuPaul’s Drag Race alongside the Hindu guru Neem Karoli Baba, Abraham Lincoln, and an assortment of animals straight out of an Edward Hicks (1780-1849) portray coexisting in a panorama paying homage to Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944). Nonetheless, there are additionally moments that can not be named, the place the orientation falls aside and there’s a destabilizing second, similar to unexplainable shapes. As Black says: “Like a type of fog that came visiting issues. The second when colours and shapes change into one thing else for a second, earlier than considering. The place we type of look with out figuring out, after which our thoughts is available in and items issues collectively to change into a automobile, or a tv”. Black’s work join private moments with the exterior world, the place people, animals and nature all coexist.
Very similar to Black, Aubrey Levinthal’s work are additionally involved with a shifting actuality. For this exhibition, Levinthal locations an emphasis on how the division of house impacts expertise. Levinthal depicts transitory encounters similar to a crowd exiting a subway station, a mom and baby enduring a rising wave, and a girl gazing longingly up at a shoe retailer. Shared environments are fraught with nuanced stress and private connection. Utilizing vertical house to isolate figures in quotidian public settings brings consideration to their inside life and connection to the surface world. “Watching others, and watching ourselves by others”, Levinthal says. In Weighted Blanket (2024) and Blue Sheet (2024), Levinthal engages with the mummified form typically seen in Historic Egyptian artwork historical past. Right here, symbolizing not solely spirituality, but in addition self-reflection, and self-care. Levinthal truncates objects by utilizing flat blocks of shade to render them into mere shapes. A inexperienced blanket engulfing a sleeping girl on a settee echoes Pierre Bonnard’s (1867-1947) interiors. In Shoe Retailer Woman (2024), the protagonists sweater is similar shade because the background, highlighting the formal high quality of the pink line representing a handbag strap. Levinthal’s work seize moments of vulnerability in a fast-paced world.