BELLWETHER is pleased to present Paula Wilson’s first New York solo exhibition, The Stained Glass Ceiling. Wilson will exhibit a cumulation of paintings, prints, drawings, and mosaics created over the past three years. Her hybrid artworks combine various painting and printmaking techniques such as woodblock, silkscreen, and lithography. Pastoral and decorative motifs are depicted through collaged layers of paper and pigment in artworks whose surfaces have a textured, patinated beauty. Women appear in a range of guises: as nude figures dancing around an urn; as grandiose, oversized ladies; and as tough, self-reliant world travelers. All represent different facets of femininity, and call into question the roles of adornment and decoration within the lives of women, and within visual art as a whole.
The dense layering of color, image, pattern, and material in Wilson’s paintings acts as a visual metaphor for the complex stratum of histories and cultures that inform her work. Depictions of verdant gardens are overlaid with woodblock prints of compact discs; decorative vases feature exploding bouquets and graffiti-like scrawls of spray paint; an immense portrait of a lady is seemingly generated from within through an accumulation of other, autonomous, artworks. These conflations reference the myriad factors that contribute to the development of an identity, and an artistic practice.
Paula Wilson received her MFA from Columbia University in 2005. Her work has been featured in group and solo exhibitions in the US and Europe, including Paintings and Drawings from the Hanno Valley, Gallery Suzy Shammah, Milan (solo); Frequency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Turn the Beat Around at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, The Manhattan Project, Fred Snitzer Gallery, Miami; Cinema Remixed and Reloaded: Black Women Artists and the Moving Image Since 1970, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta; and Black Alphabet: Contexts of Contemporary African American Art, Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw. Wilson lives and works in New York and New Mexico.
Paula would like to thank everyone at the Leroy Neiman Center for Print Studies at Columbia University, Mike Lagg for his innovative help mounting, framing, and transporting the work, and Beverly Wilson for everything and more.
PROJECT ROOM
SARAH CONAWAY Some New Works
BELLWETHER is pleased to present Sarah Conaway’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. Conaway works in photography, drawing, and collage. Her black and white photographs primarily document sculptural constructions made from fabrics, foam, and everyday detritus. Although created from innocuous or abject materials, the resultant compositions have an aspiratory, poetic quality that elevates them beyond their initial materiality.
The aesthetic of Conaway’s images is indebted to the visual history of art, from the playful psychologies of Surrealists such as Man Ray, to the structured spirituality of Modernists like Constantin Brancusi. Her use of this visual language is at once irreverent and an homage. In discussing her work, Conaway references ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement, in which balance, order, and impermanence are paramount. The transitory nature of Conaway’s subjects references the instability of life and the passage of time, yet her work is not invested in Barthes’ concept of the petit mort. Instead, Conaway is interested in evoking and harnessing an intangible kinetic energy through still images that are pregnant with motivation.
The photographs in SOME NEW WORKS depict a range of massive, iconic structures: pyramids, columns, and glaciers – all rendered with evident artifice and at a small scale, in quotidian materials such as Styrofoam, cardboard, and paper. These images underscore the absurdity inherent to the grandiose, and project a melancholic yearning for greatness, in which the knowledge of futility is pervasive.
Sarah Conaway received her MFA in Photography from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2001. Her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions in the US and abroad, including Opposition is Essential, Julia Friedman Gallery, New York (solo); New Symmetrical Works, Julia Friedman Gallery, Chicago (solo); Post Rose: Artists In and Out of Hazard Park, Galerie Christian Nagel, Berlin (curated by Sterling Ruby); I Am Eyebeam, Gallery 400, Chicago (curated by Melanie Schiff and Lorelei Stewart); and When Darkness Falls, Midway Gallery of Contemporary Art, Minneapolis. She has also curated numerous exhibitions under the auspices of Destroyer, Inc. in Los Angeles and Chicago. Conaway lives and works in Los Angeles.
