Our friends at the Green Family Art Foundation is pleased to present No Storm Was Ever Quite So Fierce, in the foundation’s Spotlight Gallery, opening on February 10, 2024, and remaining on view until May 12, 2024. The exhibion will present new paintings by Britsh artist Daisy Parris. Running concurrently with No Storm Was Ever Quite So Fierce is Some Dogs Go to Dallas, a group exhibition featuring works from the collection of Pamela and David Hornik in the foundation's Main Gallery. More on that next week.
Daisy Parris is a painter of psychological space. Direct text-based works and abstract paintings are made up of a vernacular that has developed through experience, relationships, and the depths and peaks of their human existence thus far. Parris brings intimacy, insight, and integrity to their paintings with great psychological and emotional force. The work is imbued with the sensitivity of one who feels everything, taking us through unflinching narratives and moments of reflection and tenderness. An ode to human existence, their work is sometimes silent, sometimes savage, with paintings that construct self-portraits of personal battles and triumphs in a fast moving yet contemplative assault on the canvas.
The title for the exhibition No Storm Was Ever Quite So Fierce is an adaptation by Parris from lyrics to the song Get Up by their favorite band Sleater-Kinney. The original lyric is “and when you were near, no sky was ever quite so clear.” There are also references to the Sleater-Kinney song Jumpers in the exhibition, a song about the high suicide rates at the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. The painting titled 4 Seconds Was The Longest Wait has been taken directly from the song, as well as the text Your Falling Shape, which has been adapted from the original lyric “my falling shape.”
Parris scratches the written words onto fronds of frayed canvas and heavy-handedly affixes them to the paintings. Certain phrases have become synonymous to Parris’ practice and their hand, notably “Faded by the sun, weathered by the storm” and “Your falling shape” stand out as particular leitmotifs in this exhibition. Parris’ words make a nod to limericks, rhyming couplets, and poems from childhood, offering up a playful format and a dexterity of one who is as an adept wordsmith as they are a painter. Painted words and painterly gestures coexist in these new works; bringing a physicality to the text that is almost tangible.
The works in this exhibition take us on an unswerving journey to an end point. Parris guides us through an undaunted story of extreme parallels which we so often see in their work - the beautiful and the brutal sitting side by side. These works examine the jump, the fall, freedom and release, brutality, bravery, and peace. There are references and imagery in the works of objects or bodies being weathered, in Parris’ terms being weathered reveals you as a survivor, someone who has endured experiences and lived through the seasons. Parris refers to storms many times in the works and remarks that “people are storms and people also weather storms,” in an intoxicatingly pleasing perception that we have come to expect from their understanding.
As insightful and imaginative as ever, the works in this exhibition are a parade of Parris’ painterly prowess. The paintings are forever moving forward, forever investigating the depths of our human condition. Parris moves ahead of us, asking questions that we do not dare to ask ourselves. This exhibition shows us bravery and compassion in equal measure in a way that only Parris knows how.
