The Museum of Nice Arts St. Petersburg presents a solo exhibition by Bahamian artist Gio Swaby. “Gio Swaby: Contemporary Up” opens on the MFA on Might 28 and runs by means of October 9, 2022. The corresponding artwork catalog can also be obtainable on the MFA Retailer. The duvet (proven above) encompasses a element of her 2017 piece “My Palms Are Clear 4” (thread and material sewn on canvas; Assortment of Claire Oliver and Ian Rubinstein). See extra data under. The MFA is situated at 255 Seashore Drive NE in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Description: The Museum of Nice Arts, St. Petersburg is proud to current the primary solo museum exhibition of multidisciplinary artist Gio Swaby (b. 1991, Nassau, Bahamas), whose work explores the intersections of Blackness and womanhood. Using the portrait style and a spread of textile-based strategies, Swaby’s work is anchored in a need to current and have fun the complicated personalities of the sitters. Considering restorative types of resistance, she has said, “My work operates within the context of understanding love as liberation, a therapeutic, and restorative pressure. These items have fun private type, energy, magnificence, individuality, and imperfections.”
Swaby works in collection kind, and the exhibition will function our bodies of labor spanning 2017 by means of 2021. Rising up surrounded by the threads and materials of her mom, a seamstress, Swaby chooses to work in mediums historically related to domesticity as a method to imbue her works with familiarity, labor, and care. Swaby upends custom, nonetheless, and offers the stitching medium a way of monumentality with the life-size collection Fairly Fairly. The themes are intricately rendered in freehand strains of thread and proven on the reverse aspect of the canvas in order that the stitching course of—its knots and free threads, so usually hidden—is seen. There’s a vulnerability to “exhibiting the again,” however Swaby embraces and elevates the imperfections.
Swaby’s artwork is centered upon the private connections cast between topic and artist, and dialog is essential to reaching these portraits of magnificence and energy that she deems love letters to Black ladies. The portraits start with a photograph shoot whereby the themes are captured in a second of empowerment and self-awareness. Swaby foregrounds their private type —seen within the detailed renderings of knickknack, hair, and clothes—creating area for self-definition and unapologetic self-expression.
Swaby earned her BFA in Movie, Video and Built-in Media from Emily Carr College of Artwork + Design, Vancouver, BC and is at present finishing an MFA in Interdisciplinary Artwork, Media and Design at OCAD College, Toronto, ON. She has exhibited internationally, and her work is included within the everlasting collections of main public establishments all through the US.
This exhibition is co-organized with the Artwork Institute of Chicago, the place it would open in 2023. A totally illustrated catalogue, printed by Rizzoli Electa, accompanies the exhibition and options an interview between Swaby and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Nikole Hannah-Jones, in addition to collection introductions by the artist and essays by Melinda Watt, the Artwork Institute of Chicago’s Chair and Christa C. Mayer Thurman Curator of Textiles, and Katherine Capsule, Curator of Up to date Artwork, Museum of Nice Arts, St. Petersburg.
For extra data, see https://mfastpete.org/exh/gio-swaby/
See Gio Swaby’s work right here: https://www.gioswaby.com/