SOCO Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Still Life at Home, a solo exhibition of new gouache on panel and gouache on paper works by artist Anne Buckwalter.
Still Life at Home is a meditation on the small pleasures of rural life, and the intersection of domesticity, interiority, and erotic imagination. The paintings focus on the rituals of housework and daily rural living. Seasons change, as seen in the background of the compositions, but there is a striking loyalty to the serenity of an interior world despite an ever-changing exterior one.
Living in rural Maine, Buckwalter found that “in the undistracted stillness, there is the invitation to obsess, to fantasize, to burrow inwards and see how deep you can go.” This body of work calls attention to the artist’s close-looking at simple details mixed with unexpectedly provocative subject matter.
Strawberry Jam depicts a scene where a steaming pot sits on the stove beside a bowl of softened strawberries. On the shelf above, a nude statuette can be seen among mugs, a candle, and a patterned pitcher. “I see my work as a kind of exercise in making what is boring erotic, and what is erotic boring,” says Buckwalter. Her childhood home was full of Pennsylvania Dutch folk art, decorative crafts, painted furniture, and textiles. These items bring her a sense of comfort and finding their way into her current home and into her paintings, create an ideal environment for these juxtapositions to occur.
Buckwalter strives to create work where viewers can comfortably engage with a potentially uncomfortable subject. She is interested in normalizing sex and sexuality, appreciating it as a meaningful topic deserving of intellectual attention, and de-sensationalizing it by situating the erotic within the context of the everyday.
Figures are not always seen in her interiors, but when they are, they are cropped or shown through a door in the background of the work in a way that conceals their faces, and sometimes even their gender. Their actions, therefore, take precedence. In Knees in the Moonlight, a couple’s legs are seen entangled in bed while in Snowstorm Breakfast, a female figure nude from the waist down enjoys a meal of eggs, toast, and avocado as snow falls outside.
Pretzel Day displays a variety of objects across a large kitchen that only hint at the homeowner’s actions. While some items are explicit, others make viewers question what is and what is not meant to be suggestive, achieving Buckwalter’s intention to blur the lines of sexuality and its perception.
