"Blade is currently staging her first solo show with Night Gallery, Los Angeles, "It's About Time," presenting a new body of work that invites viewers into her lambent creative world. Following on the heels of her recent solo at the Powerlong Museum in Shanghai, and her inclusion in the group exhibition "Superbloom" at Night Gallery, this newest show at once expands and hones the artist's creative lines of inquiry."
"Regularly using acrylic and ink on cotton poplin and a "wet-on-wet" technique allow her to achieve a distinct sense of depth and saturation, resulting in the figurative and representational elements of her compositions operating non-hierarchically with moments of abstraction. For the body of work on view in "It's About Time," Blade began with a straightforward guideline, one that saw her focus entirely on still lifes and landscapes from in and around her home base at different hours of the day."
"The temporal facet of this endeavor positions the California light itself as a key, underpinning presence throughout the show, alluding to themes of change and the unending, unerring forward movement of time. The result of these creative parameters are canvases that at first glance appear as straightforward domestic scenes or natural landscapes, but through prolonged looking reveal a rather unsteady depiction of reality, one shaped by the artist's own personal worldview, considerations of memory, and emotional connection to the subject matter."
"Surveying the show, the idiosyncratic use of scale is perhaps the first indicator of the deeply individual, even psychological, slant to Blade's paintings."
Los Angeles-based painter Michelle Blade creates shimmering works where memory, perception, and projections of the future combine into light and color impressions. Her first solo show with Night Gallery in Los Angeles, titled “It’s About Time,” presents new paintings shaped by Southern California inspiration, lived experiences, motherhood, and color. She uses acrylic and ink on cotton poplin with a wet-on-wet technique to build depth and saturation, allowing figurative and representational elements to coexist with abstraction without hierarchy. The paintings begin from a guideline focused on still lifes and landscapes near her home at different times of day, making California light central. Prolonged viewing reveals an unsteady depiction of reality influenced by personal worldview, memory, and emotional connection, with idiosyncratic scale reinforcing a psychological slant.
#contemporary-painting #light-and-color #memory-and-perception #time-and-change #still-life-and-landscape
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