“Eternal Reverie” Exhibition

1969 Gallery (39 White St.)

[Image: Sarah Lee "Night breeze" (2023) oil on canvas, 60h x 70w in.]

This event has ended.

1969 Gallery presents Eternal Reverie, a group exhibition featuring the works of Olive Diamond, Charlotte Edey, Landon Bailey Higgins, Alyssa Klauer, and Sarah Lee.

Eternal Reverie refers to a period of endless daydreaming; of a desire to exist within a fantasyland, only accessible through another plane of thought. Walking the line between abstraction and realism, these artists are all penetrating new terrain with the creation of uncanny scenes.

Taking inspiration from her Jewish heritage, Olive Diamond creates fantastical landscapes, inspired by the Kabbalah’s idea of losing oneself in order to discover the knowledge of that which one wishes to understand. Her painting, Belt of Venus, mixes a dreamy, imagined landscape with the real phenomenon of the Belt of Venus — a pinkish glow in the sky visible shortly before sunrise or after sunset. Similarly, Sarah Lee creates dreamy landscapes, often taking place in the evening with a strong blue palette. Lee’s paintings are poetic, using the light of natural forces, such as falling stars, moons and lightning to build an atmosphere that is simultaneously charged and peaceful. This can be seen in Night breeze, with the moon shining through a dark forest.

Landon Bailey Higgins is known for his vibrant figurative paintings depicting luminous gummy bears in narrative scenes, which function as a vehicle for self-identification and exploration of light. Like Oive Diamond and Sarah Lee, Higgins’s paintings portray otherworldly landscapes, with the addition of this figurative element. In Past and Present, an orange gummy bear looks longingly out of a window and up to a crescent moon, encapsulating a feeling of both loneliness and hope. This painting is also a direct reference to Augustus Egg’s Past and Present, No. 2 - Prayer, which depicts a family grieving the death of their patriarch after he dies of heartbreak from infidelity.

Alyssa Klauer’s paintings use vibrant colors and a transparent layering process to create ghostly scenes, which contrast the idea of an internal dream state vs. an external reality. Vampire Fantasy relies on a heavily saturated red to create a circular composition, carrying you from the background figure’s bloodthirsty eyes to the flowers in the foreground, being drained of all signs of life. Charlotte Edey uses more subdued colors to express equally haunting and erotic scenes. In her works on paper, Edey illustrates smooth figurative shapes on top of simplified backgrounds. In Finger Coils, a hand with sharp, elongated fingers toys with a long coiled cord draping downwards.

Eternal Reverie presents otherworldly works that culminate to create a highly seductive reality portrayed through the artists’ shared use of luminous, saturated colors and exaggerated forms.