About the Exhibit - I Won’t Fear Tumbling or Falling/If We’ll be Joined in Another World

What a title. That alone should tell you this is an incredible exhibit. ‘I Won’t Fear Tumbling or Falling/If We’ll be Joined in Another World’ is an exhibit by Christina Quarles at Pilar Corrias in London, on view from October 8th to November 21st (but probably closing 11/6 because of the lockdown). 

Quarles created the nine paintings displayed in the exhibit during lockdown in California. 

“Through this exhibition, she continues to explore the complex vocabulary of the physical body and the experience of inhabiting one in the space of the world and in proximity to other bodies, particularly in the current moment, with its dizzying combination of personal immobility, the struggle for racial justice, and global agitation.” (source) 

“The intimacy in these paintings is not always fixed or based on interactions with multiple people; sometimes it’s an intimacy or interaction with the self, or a memory or idea of the self.”  (source) 

“Intimacy, for me, is any moment we are fully embodied, any moment when we exist beyond the flattened face we present to the world and can exist in the round as whole beings—with fronts and backs and in all of our complexity and contradiction.” - Christina Quarles (source) 

“Intimacy is love and sex and touch, but it is also sickness and violence and death. Throughout these past six months, our fear of intimacy in these latter forms has meant sacrificing other, more pleasurable forms of intimacy.” - Christina Quarles (source) 

“We are enduring an unbearable lack of physical intimacy in order to protect ourselves from an intimacy we physically could not bear. And, as a result, we have found ourselves in an extended flattened state, one of disembodiment and disorientation. Without these punctuations of intimacy, we have begun to lose our frame of reference, leaving us with a strange relationship to time and the world around us.” - Christina Quarles (source) 

She could not have described quarantine and this past year any better. Time has moved fast and slow, and humanity has experienced the whole gamut of emotions from loneliness to exhilaration in self discovery and beyond. 

About the Artist - Christina Quarles 

Christina Quarles is an American artist who lives and works in LA. She received an MFA from the Yale School of Art, and holds a BA from Hampshire College. Quarles was a 2016 participant at the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture

"The legibility of gender and race—what it means to live in a racialized, gendered, queer body and how perceptions of us influence our interactions with others and our environments—has always been a focus of Quarles’s work.” (source)

To see a walkthrough of the exhibit, skip ahead to 6:15 in the video below.