Judith Reidy’s Solo Exhibition

of

Scenes and Emblems

Everyone has a story, a story which contains chapters of loss and chapters of renewal, sometimes a chapter of the two intertwined. Death, discord, desertion, and the demands of life write these chapters for every one of us. For each such chapter there is an empty chair, a cold hearth, a riderless saddle, a boat with no boatman—configurations for living that have been rendered vacant and yet, in being vacated, afford new shapes for living and novel forms of life. Emptiness born of loss burrows a hollow in our hearts, eroding the spirit over time, until—perhaps—something happens to waken us to our brokenness and sensitize us to our very selves. Once sensitized, the creative force of healing empowers us to repurpose the empty spaces opened by loss, to find new ways of living in them.

With this exhibition, I explore two themes—scenes of absence and emblems of rebirth—to develop a visual meditation on this process of loss and renewal. Through play with figural sparsity, textural minimalism, washed chiaroscuro, and muted tonalities, I seek to create ambiances of emptiness and the fraught emotions that fill them throughout the process of repurposing them. As you explore this exhibition, I invite you to enter the empty configurations I chronicle, explore your own feelings inside them, and then—hopefully—imagine new ways of filling them.

Judith Reidy 2024