SOLO EXHIBIT

Laini Nemett

“Between Walls” – Paintings

OCTOBER 24, – December 20, 2020

BETWEEN WALLS

LAINI NEMETT  – Paintings

My work responds to the lived, remembered, and imagined histories that emerge from aging buildings, ancient dwellings, and new constructions. The paintings in this exhibit draw from experiences in Africa, France, Maryland, and Wyoming, and were inspired in particular by São Tomé e Príncipe, a small island country off the west coast of Africa where I painted throughout one summer. Many homes were pieced together with found materials, each colorful house a collage that showcased the personality of the family that lived there. After São Tomé, I began to build small cardboard models of collaged photographs as reference for large-scale oil paintings with collapsed planes and shifted perspectives, spaces at once believable and impossible. Without painted figures in my compositions, the viewer becomes the inhabitant, or pathfinder, and can create a more personal relationship to how others may live in, move through, and sometimes abandon, these shelters. Composite architectural details allude to disparate stories between walls, as moments in time and place fuse into one.