Mindy Solomon Gallery

Natalia Arbelaez creates figures that embrace humor and history. “In my work, I am a storyteller. I am telling narratives about my Colombian family’s immigration, the pre-Columbian South American presence, and my American latchkey, after school cartoon childhood. All of these stories work together to create a multicomponent self-portrait of what it is like to be a Mestizo Colombian-American hybrid. Mining tidbits from historical research, familial narratives, and cartoon culture, I create surreal stories in clay much in the way Gabriel García Márquez did with words, autobiographically narrating history with its ups and downs, its humor and tears. Making my work is an act of revealing undervalued histories from Latin American, Amerindian and Women of Color. These identities are lost through conquest, migration, and time, then gained through family, culture and exploration, and finally passed down through tradition, preservation, and genetic memory. I have found value in my histories and aim to help preserve my cultures by honoring them through my artwork.”

Katelyn Ledford is an artist living and working in Boston, Massachusetts, but born and bred in the American South. “Ultimately, I seek a mode of painting that can slow down the viewer and make them consider our image-saturated, emotional-whiplash, contemporary reality within the framework of portraiture. In my studio practice, I consider the role of images in shaping the curated portrait of women at large and individually while also reflecting on the complex and often painful reality of what it means to be a woman and artist. Appropriated images are sourced from historical paintings, television shows, social media, and Google fever dreams while contrasting symbols and shapes unfold improvisationally. Resolution and application of images and materials fluctuate from trompe-l’oeil and photorealism to textural impasto and squeezing paint from the tube in order to play with authenticity and truthfulness in the deconstructed portraits. The tone lies in a mix of cynicism, humor, and absurdist logic— like the feeling of sucking on a sour candy, you smile through the pain and pleasure.“

Samantha Joy Groff s a figure painter from rural Pennsylvania raised in a small Mennonite community. She writes about her work: “How does the spirit endure? My paintings capture the duality of hard living and deep yearning a rural female experience. Drawing on my upbringing in a small Mennonite community in Pennsylvania, I use figure paintings to process personal tragedies and unpack the cultural mystique of the Mennonites. I hope to evoke an emotionally fractured existence that doesn’t fit neatly into the dominant narrative of blue-collar women presented in popular media. My practice flirts with Appalachian Fatalism, the cultural mindset of hopelessness in many towns like mine. You work, You toil, You die. There are many real reasons for this attitude to persist within my community. I can’t speak for others, but I’ve endured financial precarity, and the opioid crisis. On an environmental level, I grew up drinking toxic water and smelling the constant waft of the slaughterhouse. It certainly is a bleak and isolated existence. However bleak, the question of spirit remains intact. My goal is to show an overwhelming vibrancy within that disrupts the fatalism. I use neon glowing underpainting to illustrate the pulsing of a divine spirit underneath the picture plane’s realism. Rather than abandoning this part of my identity, I found a crucial opportunity to rework an oversimplified idea of blue-collar women to bring insight and empathy.”

Elizabeth Huey Elizabeth Huey’s panoramas are portraits of the miraculous. Honoring remembrance and reconstruction, she highlights our human capacity to draw invention and intimacy from catastrophe. Born from a substratum of expressive paint, the architectural and figural elements in Huey’s paintings hail from a multiplicity of styles and eras. The spatial arrangements and scale shifts support a hypnagogic sense of seeing things from the inside out. Through historical research and channeling, she delves into energetic complexities and explores the dynamics of mystical connections.

Caroline Absher paints compelling large-scale portraits that gaze deeply into the eyes of the viewer. “These paintings of closeness may feel like a memory of love or a hazy visualization of it. Past or future, they are what we tend to think of when loneliness creeps in. I find it so sweet that the minds natural reflex is to transform hopelessness into images of beauty. Whenever I feel without something, I can’t help but to imagine it in all its glory. Fantasy has a way of keeping people going. So as Hospitality Suite is “an homage to the empty in all of us”, here are two paintings of the byproduct. I have learned they are meant to be thrown on the fire to keep it burning.”

Julie Heffernan is an American painter whose artwork has been described by the writer Rebecca Solnit as “a new kind of history painting” and by The New Yorker as “ironic rococo surrealism with a social-satirical twist.” In her artist statement she writes: “If I’m lucky I’ll unearth a deeper story in the process of painting than the one I started with, one that contains a secret within it, something that takes me to a more complex level of understanding. Secrets occur in painting when imagery gives way to feeling—a certain kind of tactility or odd detail, creating nodal points that conjure awareness of deeper levels of intention. The experience reminds me of the ancient Greek theory of vision, conceived as a kind of effluvium emanating from the pupil that reaches out and touches the object of vision with psychopodia, or mind fingers. This kind of felt touch happens with the recognition of a secret in a painting. We are, all of a sudden, touching inside ourselves, linked for an instant both to our own subconscious experience and to the mind of the artist through its painted corollary. It is not a simple idea of thick or showy paint, but a concentrated moment of visual density where the paint embodies focus and speaks to a deeper intentionality, where we enter the mind through the eyes of the artist and become her. It is an opening”

Paige Turner-Uribe creates soft nostalgic stories. Turner-Uribe writes about her work for Hospitality Suite: “This painting is of a woman I used to see almost daily wandering around town. She would often read or nap on city benches, falling asleep slumped over with her head on her chest. She usually wore a lavender skirt suit with lavender stockings, and sometimes a winter coat and beanie. Though she was always alone, she appeared self-possessed in her solitude. She was striking and beautiful with her white hair and lavender outfit, and I would always spot her in daily scenes. I never spoke with her and I don’t think she ever noticed me, though I saw her dozens of times. The painting touches on the transience of our existence, our solitude and the way we move through one another’s lives, sometimes only through observation.”

Sahana Ramakrishnan works from a Buddhist standpoint of Non-duality, which imagines there to be no true distinction between the individual and the totality of being. “My work is animated by a search for interpretations of the universe that account for its expansiveness and for its endless ability to shape shift. In this search I draw from multiple ancestral traditions, and I am moved by the desire for cultural continuation as well as for an understanding of our deteriorating relationship with the earth. Though I have been primarily educated in the western traditions of painting, my works sits firmly on the shoulders of a broad range of Indian miniature traditions, most significantly of which are tantric lineages that prioritize visualizations and mantras. To me, art is a gateway, a prayer, a site of healing and contemplation. To me, paintings are objects of magic and alchemy. An idea sits at the center of my practice – that the story of separation between “I” and “other”, “life” and “death” is an illusion. Non-duality is a concept that reminds us that perceived “otherness” is actually a form of interdependence. This idea is repeated and reiterated in many forms within my works in parallel with what I struggle with in my life. In my paintings I call upon narratives, figures and symbols that have deep rooted cultural significance and momentum to help me unfurl my contemplations.”

Melanie Daniel creates layered, psychologically and environmentally compelling works. Dreamlike and evocative Daniel’s psychedelic, unnatural palette, dense areas of vibrating pattern, and skewed perspectives underscore the uneasy relationship between the subjects and their environment. The result of nature overwhelming the human presence is reminiscent of Jules de Balincourt, Hernan Bas, or Lisa Yuskavage. Daniel’s big, brash, and strangely beautiful works are cautionary yet hopeful. They show the resilience of nature, as plants and flowers intermingle with graffitied ruins and threaten to overrun the canvas.