For the 2022 Independent Art Fair, Night Gallery is pleased to preseent new work by Cynthia Daignault, Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola, and Anne Libby. Across their distinct practices, these three artists reframe the categories of ephemera and monument in material testaments to lived experience, memory, and collectivity.
In her new works, Cynthia Daignault continues her exploration of history painting through the depiction of three images embedded within the American cultural memory. Rendered in gradations of black and gray, Daignault's paintings are reminiscent of afterimages—optical illusions referring to the sustained legibility of a visual form after exposure ends, such as when one closes their eyes. Through the work, Daignault draws parallels between the individual psyche and the collective consciousness.
Anthony Olubunmi Akinbolai responds to and updates the legacy of the readymade, placing sculptural practice in-dialogue with traditions of abstract painting. Formal exchanges within and between artworks push the artist's materials away from their typical cultural and historical evocations, emphasizing plays of color and texture while highlighting unexpected thematic associations. Throughout the artist's process, he has used durags as a primary material to continue the investigations of the Color Field and Action Painting movements.
Anne Libby reconfigures materials from domestic interiors, building forms that reference the architectural and technological structures that dominate both our contemporary environments and psyches. These forms confuse the macro and micro of the viewer's environment while creating something uniquely vulnerable from the industrial and corporeal elements of our surroundings.