CHART is happy to current Secret Backyard, a solo exhibition of latest work by Shona McAndrew. McAndrew will debut a dynamic set up of work and watercolors, with a gap reception on Friday April 11, from 6–8 p.m. The exhibition will stay on view by way of Could 24, 2025.
In Secret Backyard, McAndrew presents a major evolution in her formal and conceptual apply. Her early work located girls inside intimate indoor areas, whose home environments served as a haven from exterior judgements and societal stress. This afforded her topics moments of personal vulnerability and unguarded existence. In her new physique of labor, McAndrew dismantles these architectural boundaries, venturing right into a fantasy realm. Every portray is about inside a bucolic utopia which supplies a sanctuary from our modern actuality. Her topics are unabashedly engaged with nature, in lush landscapes and amongst animated wildlife.
Amid lush overgrown fields of natural world, McAndrew delves into how environments—each bodily and psychological—form expressions of security, vulnerability, and freedom. Her girls migrate from home confines to boundless pure realms. Every composition unfolds inside an Arcadian dimension the place characters and nature harmoniously coexist, creating an intertwined world of fantasy and expressions of a really perfect. They bathe with bears, roll in flowerbeds, climb timber with snakes and masturbate in fields of wildflowers with birds on their shoulder.
“I needed my imagined world to really feel indulgent. I needed it to return purely from my creativeness, to color a fantasy world that feels good,” McAndrew displays on her created paradise. “It’s good solely as a result of it doesn’t exist. It will probably’t exist in actuality and that felt liberating for the work, for me and for the women I paint.” She invitations viewers to quickly inhabit an area the place feminine our bodies and experiences exist with out constraint.
