Brandi Twilley: “The Living Room” at Sargent’s Daughters

Sargent’s Daughters is pleased to present “The Living Room”, an exhibition of paintings by the New York based artist Brandi Twilley.  This will be Twilley’s first solo exhibition and will open on Tuesday, July 26 6-8pm and be on view through August 26th, 2016.

In “The Living Room” Twilley recreates, from an amalgamation of memory, Google searches, dreams and the few surviving Polaroids, her childhood home, which burned to the ground when she was sixteen in 1999.  The ten paintings present the room from every angle and encompass multiple years, showing the slow decline of the house prior to the fire as it first becomes water damaged from a leaky roof and then consumed by waste before eventually burning down. The paintings are rendered in the saturated and murky colors Twilley associates with analog photography and, though devoid of human figures, are filled with human presence.

Twilley began the paintings without plans, using free association to let the paintings take shape as she remembered, following what felt familiar and real. As such the works are archaeological reconstructions dependent on emotional recollections. Twilley’s paintings present a challenge to realism as she incorporates the imagined landscape of childhood that suffuses the present in memories of the past.