Never Dry, a solo show by Rachel Rickert
On view: 6.8 - 7.2 2016
E.TAY Gallery is pleased to present Never Dry, a solo show featuring painting and sculpture by Rachel Rickert. The exhibition is a collection of Rickert’s most recent work addressing transformation, psychological development, and sexuality. Through paint and resin, she captures moments of transition from one life stage to the next.
Just as hand-washed underwear hangs damp on a clothesline, the artist’s most intimate garments expose her evolution from girlhood to womanhood. Never Dry is about not yet being settled on a position or a character, but stuck between fantasies of superheroes and sex. From adolescent boyshorts to performative lingerie, underwear left hung to dry starts to reveal her behavioral development. In her most recent experiment with sculpture, Rickert soaks her underwear in resin, freezing the wet fabric and memorializing what is usually a mundane ritual.
To a certain degree, all of Rickert’s paintings are self portraits. They are personal narratives within a private setting that reveal subtle moments of insecurity and impatience, the ordinary and the clandestine. But unlike traditional self-portraiture, Rickert never captures herself in a static moment. The immediacy of her paint application mimics the shifting of time. Rickert explains, “I love the seduction of wet fabric as it slowly becomes dry, just like oil on canvas.”
By capturing these private vignettes, Rickert turns viewer into voyeur. She challenges us with images of her undressing or in the throes of drunken instability, all while exposing us to her most intimate apparel. But Rickert’s painting process eases us into these personal moments by channeling movement, transition, and time-elapsed. They are fixed images not necessarily meant to be seen, yet we experience them in an ephemeral way, like a fleeting glance that goes unnoticed.
