AMY BAY // They Always Have, and Still Do

On view June 2–July 9, 2023

Opening reception Saturday, June 3 (3–5pm)

Nationale is thrilled to present They Always Have, and Still Do, an exhibition of paintings by Portland artist Amy Bay. In this new series, Bay continues her focus on reclaiming floral imagery as a rich and even radical subject in contemporary art. In offering a feminist counterpoint to how flowers have traditionally been dismissed by art history as a subject because of their association with femininity and the decorative, her paintings unfurl the beauty and poetry of a visual tradition that is ripe with meaning, precisely because of its close connection to the domestic spaces where our lives take place.

The subjects of the paintings in They Always Have, and Still Do are nominally flowers. But perhaps they should instead be called florals: decorative interpretations of plants’ reproductive structures, designed to march across walls and textiles in an infinitely repeatable grid. In Bay’s work, the floral pattern is granted autonomy from this rigid system— tendrils curling around the canvas and petals pressed against each other as they crowd inside their frames. Apparent symmetry is undermined in sets of “twinned” paintings, like a rose is a and rose is a, whose mirrored compositions only serve to highlight their differences. Bay’s use of classical oil painting techniques like imprimatura, glazing, and sgraffito adds complexity to subjects that would conventionally be depicted through restrained colors and simplified lines. What began as flat wallpaper starts to hint at depth, opening into hazy landscape-like spaces, with heavily textured surfaces that evoke the accumulation of emotion, memory, and tradition through decades of life.

Noting the use of floral motifs as symbols for a vast range of ideas including “affection, sadness, sympathy, revulsion, desire, death, the quotidian,” Bay reminds the viewer that paintings of flowers “are rarely about one particular thing.” Her titles reflect the multitude of associations that emerge throughout the creation of a painting, and that each viewer might bring to the work themselves. The name of the exhibition is snipped from a line in an experimental memoir by writer Joe Brainard titled I Remember, a sprawling ode to the ephemerality of youth and memory that is by turns humorous, critical, sensual, and visceral. Titles of individual paintings like And What You Lost or Too Deep for Tears are also borrowed, from songs, books, and everyday conversations. Bay’s practice of obliquely associative naming, like her paintings themselves, acts as a method of lovingly framing and unfolding potential layers of meaning once flattened by the weight of history.

Amy Bay (b. Elkhart, IN) is a painter based in Portland, OR. Bay holds a BFA from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Winchester School of Art. She also completed the London-based Turps Banana Correspondence Course for painters. Bay has exhibited her work at venues in the Pacific Northwest including Nationale, Ditch Projects, Melanie Flood Projects, Adams and Ollman, and SNAG Gallery, as well as throughout New York City at Peninsula Art Space, The Painting Center, The Drawing Center, Printed Matter, Brooklyn Public Library, and The Bronx Museum of the Arts. She has shown internationally in group and solo shows and has been awarded grants and projects from The Rauschenberg Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, Stelo, the Regional Art and Culture Council, The Lower East Side Printshop, Dieu Donné Papermill, and Women's Studio Workshop.

PRESS & MORE
Things to Do in Portland This Week, Matthew Trueherz, Margaret Seiler, and Sam Stites, Portland Monthly, June 15, 2023
Recommended Exhibition, Lindsay Costello, EverOut/Portland, July 2023

IMAGES

Images © Leif Anderson (individuals) and Mario Gallucci (in situ) courtesy of the Artist and Nationale 
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