Press Release - "Snail Shell" Maria Guzmán Capron & Rachel Hayden
Maria Guzmán Capron
”A La Bim Bom”
Fabric, thread, batting and acrylic paint
60 x 74 inches
2020
info@part2gallery.com
pt. 2:
Snail Shell
Maria Guzmán Capron
Rachel Hayden
Opening - Saturday, November 14, 2020
Showing Through - Friday, December 4, 2020
Schedule a private viewing
info@part2gallery.com
pt. 2 Gallery is pleased to present Snail Shell, a collaborative exhibition of new work by Maria Guzmán Capron and Rachel Hayden. The exhibition juxtaposes Hayden’s acrylic paintings with Guzman Capron’s textile wall sculptures to investigate the relationship between physiognomy, emotional state, and the idea of home.
Guzmán Capron’s composite figures exist in a state of movement and flux. Their heads often contort against their bodies, with expressive gestures and faces that are open to interpretation. Meanwhile, Hayden’s subjects gaze back at the viewer, fixed and motionless in the center of the canvas. Each artist uses repeated images and textures and reassembles them in different ways in various works. Guzmán Capron uses fragments of old clothing, drapery, and textile to create figures and frames that withhold them. Hayden’s composes and recomposes motifs of butterflies, anthuriums, celestial bodies, and faces as a means to understand psychological space.
In shimmering, vivid tones of cadmium orange, light phthalo green, and light ultramarine, Rachel Hayden rearranges recurring images, documenting her transformative journey from anxiety to joy. Flowers, butterflies, and rainbows often grace her transcendental paintings, floating in space atop lush horizons full of twinkling stars or deep allusions to twilight. These symbols of beauty and transformation are grounded by faces, sometimes in clear human forms, others in composite images with the flowers and butterflies. While the symbols are light objects indicative of joy and beauty, they do entail struggle and perseverance to reach that moment of joy - the butterfly must transform from the caterpillar, the rainbow must wait out the storm and the flower must blossom.
Rachel Hayden
”Blacklight Moth”
Acrylic on canvas
30 x 30 inches
2020
info@part2gallery.com
Composed of a rich array of fabric in bold colors and patterns, Maria Guzmán Capron’s figures and faces portray a breadth of emotion. Fluid bodies seem to leap from the wall, eager to both make and avoid eye contact. In the piece Enlace, a framed body with crossed arms attempts to bolt from her confines, perhaps from an emotional state that cannot confine her. Thanks to abstraction through fabric, Guzmán Capron’s subjects become mirrors of our own emotional states, enabling moments of self-reflection and discovery. Guzman’s latest compositions include layers of acrylic paint atop the fabric. Whereas the choosing and stitching of fabric is a methodical process, painting allows the artist moments of unplanned gesture, where inward reflection and outward expression reveal the importance of breaking rules and routines.
Both Hayden and Guzmán Capron revel in the comfort of home, a place of emotional peace and safety. Hayden describes the home as a snail shell, “where you have everything you need.” The works in Snail Shell come at a time of forced reflection when the artists retreated to their homes, like the rest of the world. These moments of introspection helped guild the artists towards a fresh start. There’s a sense of order and calm to each work, guided by a Marie Kondo-esque cleansing of all that does not bring joy. For Hayden, this manifests in her tightly considered symbolic language, for Guzmán Capron, in a repurposing of personal clothing and textile. In the end, home is more than a physical place, rather a manifestation of the comfort and joy that you bring along in your snail shell.
Maria Guzmán Capron
”Caracol”
Fabric, thread, batting and acrylic paint
58 x 46 inches
2020
info@part2gallery.com
Maria Guzmán Capron (b. 1981 in Milan, Italy to Colombian and Peruvian parents) lives and works in Oakland, CA. She received an MFA from California College of the Arts (CCA) in 2015 and her BFA from the University of Houston in 2004. Some recent exhibitions include Being Human Is Hard at pt.2 Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Female Trouble 2 at CULT Aimee Friberg Exhibitions, San Francisco, CA; Body Spray at Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art, Buffalo, NY; Don’t Eat Me at Deli Gallery in Brooklyn, NYC; Through Her Eye at Mana Contemporary in Chicago, IL; and Snail Shell opening this month at pt. 2 Gallery, Oakland, CA. She is a cofounder and past member of CTRL+SHFT Collective, an exhibition space and thirteen studios located in West Oakland and operating with an emphasis on collaborating with underrepresented arts communities, including artists of color, and queer and non-binary artists. She also works as a full-time mother and part-time facilitator at NIAD Art Center, a progressive art studio helping more than 60 artists with disabilities create art. Maria Guzmán Capron often thinks about herself as something that is vibrating, a human shape that becomes blurry from shaking. In this indefinition she sees possibility. She imagines a body with arms that extend and twist, legs that are powerful reaching and bending in inexplicable ways. An extraordinary self, that is irreverent, awkward and melodramatic. Guzmán Capron portrays many of these characters by quilting shapes made out of colorful textiles and collaging, sewing them together. She also sculpts them by sewing small pieces of fabric around armatures made out of wire and batting, capturing their, her, emotions, feelings and expressions. She takes pleasure in making and in working with fabric. She found a relationship with her process, a craft, and there is a lot of communication, questions and answers that come by trial and error. At the end Guzmán Capron is going to become smaller and smaller until she is many crumbs of dirt, but she will leave behind a sticky, gooey trail of sparkling moments of everyone that she was.
Rachel Hayden
”Moth Costume (Night)”
Acrylic on panel
20 x 16 inches
2020
info@part2gallery.com
Rachel Hayden earned her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 2015 and now works at The Walters Art Museum as a director of children’s programming. Rachel seeks to make sense of the messy parts of life. In her paintings, Rachel “likes to approach a difficult or ambiguous feeling with childlike simplicity. Using pure, bright colors and simple shapes” she creates an ensemble cast of subjects: herself, the moon, hands, fruits and flowers, teardrops, raindrops and sweat drops. When choosing images to paint, Rachel looks for the constants — things that will always be a part of her life, but whose significance may change when placed in different scenarios. By adopting these images into her alphabet, she feels a new love and ownership of them. They are like game pieces she can move around on a board, knick-knacks she can organize on a shelf, or magnets arranged on a refrigerator door. A handful of bits and pieces shuffled around can create different stories, and as her alphabet of images grows and changes, the stories she tell slowly shift. “In painting, I have power to playfully manipulate forces greater than myself, and find control over my own visual narrative. In my job as an early childhood educator at an art museum, I spend a lot of time discussing art with preschoolers, toddlers, and babies. I’ve found a fondness for a clear, concise image, with easy-to-identify parts. I want paintings that can be broken up into bite size pieces.” Rachel’s work deals with sensations both physical and emotional, as well as phenomena of time and space. Rachel has recently shown with HARPY Gallery in Rutherford, NJ, First Amendment Gallery in San Francisco and at Resort in Baltimore. Rachel lives and works in New York.