Gay Summer Rick

About

Where: bG Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave #A2, Santa Monica, CA 90404 Hours: 12:00 - 5:00pm, Tuesday - Saturday

When: July 24 - August 23, 2021
Opening Reception: Saturday, July 24, 2021, 2:00 - 6:00pm (PDT)
Interactive Event: Saturday, August 7, 2021, 3:00 - 6:00pm (PDT)
Virtual Artist Talk Moderated by Shana Nys Dambrot: Sunday, August 15, 2021, 2:00pm (PDT) via Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/7529564029

RSVP: bggallery@bgartdealings.com

bG Gallery is pleased to present its seventh solo exhibition with painter, Gay Summer Rick. Originally slated for 2020’s exhibition calendar and postponed due to the pandemic, Rick had conceived of a wholly different body of work to show. Envisioning aerial landscapes suffused with the light and atmosphere, Rick undertook preparation for the exhibition by traveling, what she terms, a very “intentional itinerary” between Los Angeles and New York. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic she was forced, as was the rest of the world, to reevaluate her focus and turn it inwards toward family, friends, and safety. 

In conversations with those selfsame family and friends, Rick began to recognize a common thread, the ardent desire to be somewhere, anywhere else. In subsequent conversations she made a point to ask, “If you could be anywhere right now, where would you be?” Based on the responses received, Rick’s “intentional itinerary” was transmuted into an “interventional itinerary” and her depictions of that itinerary shifted to match. As much as she used it as a tool to transport herself, Rick's newest paintings are meant as a means to help viewers emerge from their collective lockdowns and to carry them to inspirational places. The resultant locales are intended to show “moments of joy,” where her audience is “enveloped in a quiet calm, holding onto big dreams, and embracing hope for the brightest days ahead.” The series is a gorgeous celebration of our return to life. With a wide open lens, Rick explores location, palette, and the unexpected, championing optimism, peace, and joy.

Gay Summer Rick’s primary preoccupation is the search for beauty and has found her spending years culling urban landscapes for hidden treasure. A longtime Los Angeles transplant from New York, Rick has used painting to reclaim home and her place in ever changing cityscapes. Rick’s work expresses quiet vibration and the surprising beauty of commonplace elements found in the urban environment. Her work describes this in a dreamlike yet familiar manner. Rick’s paintings are created using palette knives and layered veils of color, and they articulate the pulse of life where the city meets the sea, rendering her work as energetic as the tides that pull the ocean to and from the shore.

bG Gallery specializes in accomplished artists who regularly engage with and travers traditional art ideologies such as expressive-conceptual, insider-outsider, high-low, figurative-abstract, among many others. bG’s aim is to bring authentic art with elements of human spirit back to the forefront of the contemporary art scene.

For more information visit https://bgartgalleries.com