FLOWERS FOR MINNIE

SOLO EXHIBITION BY VERNON O’MEALLY

PRESS RELEASE:

FLOWERS FOR MINNIE | Solo Exhibition by VERNON O’MEALLY 
VIRTUAL OPENING: THURSDAY, JUNE 4, 2020 | 5 – 6 PM (Via Instagram Live)
ON VIEW (BY APPOINTMENT): JUNE 4 - SEPTEMBER 4, 2020 
LOCATION: ABXY Lower East Side | 9 Clinton Street | New York, NY 10002 
SOCIAL MEDIA: @vernonomeally | @abxyles | abxy.co | Artsy 
FOR ALL PRESS INQUIRIES PLEASE CONTACT MELANIE KIMMELMAN

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LISTEN TO EXHIBITION PLAYLIST (CURATED BY VERNON O’MEALLY)

ABXY is pleased to announce Flowers for Minnie a solo exhibition by artist Vernon O’Meally. Flowers for Minnie marks the artist’s second solo show with the gallery. It will be on view (by appointment) from June 4 through September 4, 2020.

In the dusk of the strangest spring ever, artist Vernon O’Meally presents a collection of contemporary still life paintings composed entirely in black and white. The artist began work on this exhibition’s grey gardens months before the pandemic’s outbreak, but they so beautifully anticipate our sadness for the season of sirens and song-birds that it seems worth disclaiming: they signal preexisting conditions. Their smoke rises off fires certainly stoked, though not ignited by current events.  

In Flowers for Minnie, bursting bouquets and single stems slumped in lone biomorphic vases hang alongside scenes of dancing skeletons and completely conceptual tableaux where decal blossoms hover over chessboard backgrounds like GIFs.  Gone are the electrified rainbow palettes of past exhibitions. Here, the artist’s signature linear abstractions have been bleached like the coral reefs and assembled into salt and pepper floral arrangements, which together feel as alive and full as the spectrum of human emotion, or all the notes on a grand piano, played in a minor key. Thistles rendered in thick white impasto mingle with cartoon carnations, compelling like those on the lapels of clown suits - not real, but real - and apt to squirt water in our faces at any moment. Massive and miniature, figurative and abstract, cheery and dreary, tranquil and utterly urgent, these are not just flowers, they are all the reasons we give each other flowers. O’Meally’s grisaille does not dull the vitality expressed by his blooms; rather, it instills them with the paradoxical certainty we feel holding a photograph of someone we’ve loved and lost - so clearly within our grasp, but filling us with such eagerness that they should come to life again, we find our minds pawing for a switch that will turn the color back on and allow them to spring from the confines of their frames. 

Whether in a single petal or strewn across one of the artist’s fractal fields of geometric abstraction, O’Meally’s application of pattern in Flowers stretches the boundaries of our perception. In works like I Am So Sad, I Am So Very Very Sad, marbleized rivers of smeared black and white acrylic snake through a checkered plane. A parenthetical “frowny face” like this one :(   casts a shadow of itself onto the board, triggering the illusion that we’re looking down on the scene from above. Executed in frosty, tusk-white acrylic and deftly handled black spray paint, this gloomy grimace and its shady silhouette enter our field of vision as clouds do from an airplane, the checkered tiles below them akin to glimpses at the lines we’ve transposed on the curves of the globe. Reduced to binary code like Digital Age sock and buskin,  these kinds of abstract expressions :) :( drift about Flowers. Prompting the out of body experience produced in flight, each encounter of their trompe l’oeil seems to suggest the lack of dimensional coherence between earth and emotion, structure and spirit, embodied and ethereal, commonly characterized by depression.  

Perceptual trickery builds through the exhibition. At odds with the untethered sensation induced by O’Meally’s unfeeling faces, the cartoon elements that sprout up in Flowers tend to cohere to our understanding of gravity and two-point perspective. Apparitions like a phantom with a removeable wine bottle-head or the odd set of googly eyes flicker into pictures casually, adding a layer of absurdity wherever they emerge. Many of these characters originally debuted in a series of Depression-era Disney cartoons set to the big-band hits of 30’s scat-man, Cab Calloway. Brilliantly animated adaptations of Calloway classics like Minnie the Moocher and St. James Infirmary Blues thrilled audiences despite how plainly they satirized the physical and emotional anguish of black life during segregation. Nearly a century later, Disney’s vaudevillian visuals haunt O’Meally’s metaphorical meadows with conspicuous coolness. Seamlessly normalized and integrated into the viewer’s system of understanding, these folksy representations of historical injustice pantomime Jim Crow’s prevailing legacy, linking past and present in works that explore the chilling psychic space generated by an ever-more divisive physical, social, political, and economic American landscape. 

Notorious hussy and fan-favorite among Calloway’s wayward cast of reality-based characters, the Minnie of lyrical legend earned her nickname asking after expired food from local grocers, which she famously carried away in a baby buggy. O’Meally’s Flowers are for Minnie as much as they are for all of us trying to make the best of a bad situation on an increasingly perilous and polarized planet. But we still see the world in black and white, red or blue, fact or fiction, open or closed, boom or bust, on or off, us or them. While the endless diversity of pattern contained within this exhibition conjures pluralistic notions of countries like America, O’Meally’s chromatic constraints convey the ossifying effect of deeply held belief systems so often weaponized in political speech and partisan politics. Leaving no room for growth, the blame game drains the color of compassion from the flowers of our humanity and leaves us feeling more detached from each other (and reality) than ever. While fires burn, tides rise and pandemics peak, the artist’s two-tone botanicals represent the limitations of binary thinking on problems as complex as climate or corona. They associate a natural world in ecological collapse with the emotional breakdown society and ring with the numbing pathos that we struggle to find common ground, when to remain standing on this very ground, is precisely what’s at stake. 

Throughout Flowers, O’Meally arranges pattern, texture, and figure in delightfully unpredictable spatial relationships that defy the laws of physics to the effect of Wile E. Coyote, or an acid trip – we know not everything we’re seeing is real, but decoy details and the disruptions of misbehaving shadows surprise at first blush regardless. However, as we quickly come to accept every warped tenet that governs this realm, the works in this exhibition evoke a nearly comic expectation of distortion in visual landscapes today. The artist’s insurgencies on our perception tease with their proximity to truth, providing an eerie caricature for the flourishing uncertainty that defines the era of fake news and atmospheric decay. Arriving at the all too familiar realization that when we don’t know what’s real, no where is safe, O’Meally’s Flowers meet us between hell and high water. In all their topsy-turvy tenderness, they beat to the rhythm of our bleeding hearts, acknowledge our longing for a brighter, more balanced future, and join in our search for light in the darkness. But seeking black and white answers to *super-natural* questions, the artist leaves us pawing around for that switch, and like the elegy of a thousand tiny violins, delivers Flowers for Minnie.

Text written by Allison Barker in loving memory of George Eshareturi

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