MOONLIGHT ROOM

KRISTA LOUISE SMITH + ROSALIND TALLMADGE 

OPENING FRIDAY, 5.13.22 | 6PM – 8PM

ON VIEW UNTIL SATURDAY, 06.25.22

CARVALHO PARK announces the opening Moonlight Room, a two-person exhibition with Brooklyn-based artists Krista Louise Smith and Rosalind Tallmadge, offering a transcendent cohesion of new paintings. Seemingly wrapped in a serene, feminized coolness, the works in the show coalesce to a momentary escape, absorbing the viewer in its veil-like ethereality, an experience as concrete as it is ineffable. Each encounter holds the transitory nature of perception and memory, as the works establish a connected and open aura of light, space and calm that ultimately suggests the true nature of the artists’ task. Moonlight Room opens the evening of May 13, from 6 – 8PM, and is on view through June 25.

KRISTA LOUISE SMITH

Through veils of hyperreal color, Smith’s “deeply internal landscapes” interlace moments experienced by the artist with ones she imagines and longs for. A disciple of the skies, Smith studies shifts in atmosphere of terrains from her travels, most recently of New Mexico’s brilliant desert, where the sky was at its largest and most surreal, over a landscape that held an “incomprehensible compression of time”. Candy skies, along with collected geological fragments, fabric, and paint swatches, inform the gauzy depths of color. Smith’s handling of her palette is a soft engagement of the senses. The painting Slumber glows with a pink halo that at once lulls and subsumes, recalling the surrealities and disquieting beauty of being enveloped in a whiteout.

Each painting is held in carefully considered, painted “cradles” that specify an objecthood and reference Smith’s oscillation between painting and sculpture as her domains. In Violet Eclipse, the clarity of the grid translates seven individual paintings into portals of subjective emotion. While depicting phases of the moon, the work also revokes reference to the physical world. Its Judd-like seriality is about extending time, with implications of infinity. Violet Eclipse’s succession is like heartbeats, palpitating along the gallery wall. Similarly, the grid of Neon Diary, a triptych, supports the delicacy of Smith’s palette, while carrying reference to written pages. Syntheses of experience and identity, writing is an unwavering part of her diaristic practice.

Smith writes regularly while each painting comes into being. In an excerpt, she reveals, “these works are about confronting joy… A visual surface of a deeply internal space, mood, a feeling. These colors bring me back to my childhood—a cozy sweater, paint color of my bedroom walls, or the lilac tree outside my bedroom window. Wrapping myself in color, even then, I realize, was a way to comfort or escape the often-turbulent chaos in the house.” At once about healing and escape, the works both point to and seek to invoke these feelings. The paintings summon a sense of stillness and calm that is the central pillar in Smith’s work and demonstrate how her paintings are not meant to be merely looked at, but also felt, ever-privileging experience over interpretation.

ROSALIND TALLMADGE

Of Tallmadge’s latest works is a “mood trio,” three distinct yet harmonious opalescent works. The paintings are like a breath – light infused with glimmers of color. Simultaneously powerful and gentle, each painting is an issuance of ethereal terrains as her delicate materials become geological. The work’s engagement with the elusive qualities of light is perceptible yet out of reach while glimmering in front of the viewer. In the artist’s words, “they are meant to optically seduce yet remain elusive” – they are not static objects.

Tallmadge harnesses the phenomenological qualities of her work with mythological reference, to personify these highly abstract paintings as figures. Zephyr refers to the Greek personification of the west wind, the messenger of spring. Eos speaks of dawn, its pink and green fabric overlaid with mica flakes, and glazed with marble dust and interference powdered glass pigment, imparting a subtle blue sheen. Cloud Interlude evokes effervescence and atmosphere. There is a seemingly mystical understanding of tranquility that runs through the work, actualized by the artist’s methodological exploration of material and intention.

 The artist feminizes the surfaces of her monochrome paintings with materials of the beauty industry or costume, bringing the body, and particularly the feminine or queer body, into the work. Her receptors of light are composed of glass microbeads, silver leaf, and translucent layers of mica that allow subtle and reflective glimpses of the iridescent fabric substrate, marking her most ephemeral work to date.

The work Raindrop Prelude, a glistening sheath of translucent hand-cut lavender lepidolite, signals a shift in Tallmadge’s practice. While the sequin paintings manifest gesture, form, and lyricism, this work furthers her embrace of the meditative qualities of her laborious process. Each sliver of the rare stone is meticulously hand-cut and applied in ceaseless repetition to form a near monochrome surface on silk that reveals the subtle variation and densities occurring in the individual stones. For Tallmadge, composing these surfaces is “a garden where my mind can wander, and I exist in the present of making.”

Krista Louise Smith (b. 1986, Ontario, Canada) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her BFA from OCAD University (formerly the Ontario College of Art and Design) in Toronto in 2010, and in 2014 an MFA in Painting from the New York Academy of Art, where she was a NYAA Merit Scholarship recipient. Her work has been shown at Carvalho Park (Brooklyn); Half Gallery (New York); Andrea Festa Fine Art (Rome), in an exhibition curated by Domenico de Chirico; and the Southampton Art Center (New York), curated by Stephanie Roach. Smith has conducted residencies at the Leipzig International Artist in Residence (Leipzig, Germany); at Byrdcliffe Artist Colony (Woodstock, New York); and at the Art Students League Residency at VYT, Sparkhill, New York. She is a three-time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation for the Arts Grant and has also been awarded the Ruth Katzman Prize.

Rosalind Tallmadge (b. 1987, Cincinnati, Ohio) is a multi-media artist, currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York. She holds a BFA from Indiana University, Bloomington, IL, 2010 and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, 2015. Her works has been acquired into multiple public collections and has been exhibited widely in New York, Detroit and Chicago, including at Carvalho Park (Brooklyn); David Klein Gallery (Detroit); and most recently at the Louise Nevelson Chapel (New York). Tallmadge was featured in the 2021 exhibition, With Eyes Opened: Cranbrook Academy of Art since 1932, Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI. She has conducted residencies at the Oxbow School of Art, the DNA Residency, Provincetown, MA and the Yale Summer School of Art, New Haven, CT.