About the Exhibit - Iowa Dream
Serena Stevens’s exhibit, Iowa Dream, is currently on view at Postmasters Gallery in Tribeca from July 12 - September 12, 2020.
After many months of being in quarantine, New York galleries are beginning to open their doors with summer exhibitions.
"There are a lot of people in New York who haven't left and who deserve this gift of an exhibition" - Magda Sawon (Bloomberg News)
Postmasters recommends viewing Steven’s works “ one-on-one...in a real (physical) space.”
These are “quiet paintings that risk being rendered invisible amidst the digital fog, or suffocated by the frenetic, figurative, pop-infused iconography of art optimized to perform online.” (source)
In Iowa Dream, Steven’s beautifully paints everyday settings in her life, which makes the profound statement that beauty can be seen all around us, despite these new constraints put on all of our lives.
Steven’s project is about her return to her home of Iowa, and her self-reflection, “marking the changes in her own perspective after her departure from and return to her home.”
“The young realist painter—who recently returned to her native Iowa after chasing the light in California, New Mexico, and Rhode Island—is at her best in scenes of domestic interiors, watchfully rendered rooms that convey the contradictions of home and the tension between melancholy and intimacy (as seen in “Rocking Chair,” above).” - The New Yorker (source)
“I think of home as both a place and a feeling, something both fleeting and everlasting. A source of potential comfort or contempt, a home sinks in its roots while remaining utterly receptible to being uprooted.” Serena Stevens (source)
So even though we’ve all been staring at similar scenes for the past five months, the way Stevens translates them on the canvas is more therapeutic than traumatic.
"If you slow things down, you notice things you hadn't seen before." - Robert Wilson
About the Artist - Serena Stevens
Serena Stevens received her BFA from Western Illinois University and is currently an Iowa Arts Fellow at The University of Iowa.
Steven’s work “represents [her] interest in re-contextualizing found and personal images to form narratives reminiscent of life expectations, outcomes, and potential”
