Daily Nights

About

The title of the exhibition, Daily Nights, is borrowed from an Emily Dickinson poem that explores the desire to preserve the “perfect dream”, a metaphor for embracing the element of surprise and uncertainty. The poem explores the connection between the perceived and actual: inner and outer, content and uncomfortable. Although working in very different ways, Lacey Black and Aubrey Levinthal, are both concerned with exploring the passing of time and changing realities. Largely autobiographical, and emotionally layered, the works in this exhibition explore the fact of existence.  

Lacey Black’s paintings incorporate personal, fictitious and historical imagery. The paintings are rooted in figuration, yet dance with lyricism, abstraction and surrealism. Black likens the paintings to “vessels” which hold images, colors, textures, ideas, and experiences.* The work is deliberately unexplainable at times, almost otherworldly. Although the works can appear fantastical, they are very much shaped by lived experiences. Some of the characters in the playful procession depicted in Parade of Incarnations (2024) include family members, a drag queen from RuPaul’s Drag Race alongside the Hindu guru Neem Karoli Baba, Abraham Lincoln, and an assortment of animals straight out of an Edward Hicks (1780-1849) painting coexisting in a landscape reminiscent of Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944). However, there are also moments that cannot be named, where the orientation falls apart and there is a destabilizing moment, such as unexplainable shapes. As Black says: “Like a kind of fog that came over things. The moment when colors and shapes become something else for a moment, before thinking. Where we kind of look without knowing, and then our mind comes in and pieces things together to become a car, or a television”. Black’s paintings connect personal moments with the external world, where humans, animals and nature all coexist.