Contributed by Clare Gemima / Painter Mie Yim evidently can’t quite understand how exciting she is. “Oh, and by the way,” she said as I had one foot out of her Bronx studio, “one of the paintings in the show will be installed in front of a huge mural.” She seemed convinced of the dubiousness of this idea even though she had landed two solo exhibitions and was preparing for both at once. I thought she would elaborate, but her sentence stopped there. Over the course of our conversation, Yim’s high-energy teasing had me waiting like an excited toddler for “Belladonna” at Olympia – in coordination with “Nightshade” at Simone Subal Gallery – to open.
Tag: Clare Gemima
Erica Mao’s unprotected souls
Contributed by Clare Gemima / In Erica Mao’s paintings, presented in “Reach Through the Veil” at Rachel Uffner Gallery, figures flee from danger. Yet the artist does not allow her characters access to refuge, or any guarantee that safety has ever been in reach. Mao has thrashed paint, then re-painted, and then thrashed paint again to create compositions of furious journeying, beating rhythmic anxiety into her characters’ faces. Somewhat cruelly, Mao locks her figures in unwarrantedly self-assured moments, knowingly rendered short by liquified cliffs, exotic swamps, ominous caves, and sulking tree trunks.