Meiying Thai “I Loved You on Every Rooftop”

High Line Nine

poster for Meiying Thai “I Loved You on Every Rooftop”

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I Loved You on Every Rooftop is a solo exhibition by multidisciplinary artist Meiying Thai. The exhibition will feature a collection of works that invite viewers into a dreamlike theatrical world.

Fragmented memories come alive in Thai’s colorful dreamworld, a fantasy space that is part-storybook, part-theater set. Gestural brushstrokes combined with childlike drawing weave narratives inspired by the artist’s own experiences of love, travel, and performance. The paintings depict women as sisters, lovers, and friends—many inspired by either Thai’s own image or drawn from the women in her life. Thai, who describes her work as “visual love letters,” sees each piece as an enlarged page in an ongoing sketchbook. Love notes, eraser marks, and elements of collage add to the emphasis on process: each image suggests a larger unfolding narrative. Though the works are almost entirely autobiographical, Thai encourages her viewers to draw their own ideas from the pieces. “In the past, when I’ve shown some of these paintings, I’ve discovered this amazing interactive element where people begin to tell me their own stories,” says Thai. “Ultimately, I view each piece almost like a small theater that invites the viewer to live and imagine their own story within it.” Thai, who spent her childhood and adolescence dancing with the New York City Ballet, pulls her visual language from memories of the ballet world. Fans, guitars, costumes, and flowers create a language of symbols within her work that ground her figures in a timeless space inspired by classical ballets and her travels through southern Europe. The exhibition will also feature a new film piece by Thai exploring love through process, collage, and dance. The work utilizes Thai’s unique process of “projection collage” in which she layers moments of choreography with mediums including drawing and painting.

A limited-edition series of signed fine art prints will be available for purchase at the gallery for the duration of the exhibition.

Meiying Thai (b. 1992, New York, NY) is a Vietnamese-American multidisciplinary artist and independent curator, born and raised in New York City. She received her BFA in Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 2015, with an added focus in Art History and Global Aesthetics & Politics. Her performance background includes nearly a decade of classical ballet training at the School of American Ballet and seven years of performing with the New York City Ballet at Lincoln Center, where she was featured in media and publications including The New York Times. As a fine artist, she works in a broad range of media including drawing, painting, photography, and performance, all of which explore themes of love, healing, dual-identity, movement, the body, and fantasy. She has exhibited in both solo and group independent exhibitions in New York City and Baltimore since 2015, and her work is held in private collections nationally and abroad. She is also the founder and director of Cafe Telephone, an ongoing series of pop-up artist salons that produce and showcase experimental multimedia collaborations in intimate gatherings and environments.

Media

Schedule

from June 30, 2021 to July 12, 2021

Opening Reception on 2021-07-01 from 18:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

Meiying Thai

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