GUEST CURATOR

Sara-Jayne Parsons is the Director and Curator of the Art Galleries at TCU (Texas Christian University) in Fort Worth, Texas. She promotes the professional development of students and local artists through programming in Moudy Gallery and drives the international curatorial vision of TCU’s satellite space, Fort Worth Contemporary Arts. Her curatorial practice is informed by working in close collaboration with artists to produce new artworks through commissions, exhibitions, and artist residencies.

ARTIST

Jackie Gendel’s repetitive use of forms is both narrative and decorative. The sequencing found in her small watercolor paintings shows women in action, moving through the world with a fluid, dynamic energy in the process of becoming. These rhythmic forms echo textile designs and reference historic painters such as Sonia Delaunay, Jane Kaufman, or Joyce Kozloff. Installed on wallpaper designed by Gendel, the paintings invite conversation with practices found in interior design and home decoration.

ARTIST

For Lovie Olivia, a preoccupation with domestic interiors involves intersectional investigation of narratives, from examining Southern hospitality to revealing histories of queer women of color. She creates unique surfaces through repeated layering of plaster and pigments in her fresco-secco paintings. Simultaneously fragile and fortified, the results of Olivia’s excavations and mark-making suggest a material metaphor of how experiences overlap and identities are formed.

ARTIST

Yana Payusova’s work reflects both her cultural heritage and training in traditional Russian realist painting, and it blends the styles and symbols of folk art, icons, graphic posters, illustration & comics. The mundane activities depicted on her ceramic tiles or vessels, such as women doing the washing up or sitting under the hairdryer at the salon, are countered by gold luster highlights. Through this gesture, Payusova’s ordinary heroines become mythical protagonists in painted three-dimensional form.

ARTIST

Alexis Pye challenges traditions in portraiture to express the Black body outside of social constructs. She explores pastoral representations of the figure in gardens or parks, and integrates mixed media within painting in the form of embroidery or punch-stitch needlework. By eschewing stereotypically urban depictions of the Black body and instead embracing landscapes of pleasure and relaxation that she has experienced herself, Pye attempts to evoke feelings of playfulness, wonder, and joy in blackness.

ARTIST

Populating the space between figuration and abstraction, the women in Keer Tanchak’s paintings often appear ambiguous or out of reach. From fashion models and movie stars to royalty, her appropriated portrait subjects inhabit an iconic space that exudes luxury and pleasure. Tanchak’s reversal of the male gaze reveals a staging or branding of women’s identity through fashion and entertainment; from capturing exuberantly wallpapered interiors in a Catherine Deneuve movie to showcasing the millinery range of Princess Diana.