Inside Outside

FiveMyles

Crown Heights, Brooklyn

April 1 – May 7, 2023

Inside Outside is a site-specific exhibition of my Windowphilia life-sized ink and watercolor paintings of windows on paper. The concept of the Windowphilia series is both complex and simple. The pieces play with reflection and layers of external and internal space, exploring the precarious, terrifying idea of being on one side or the other of incarceration. While the paintings are beautiful in manifestation, presenting them enables me to address a deeply important social justice issue.

Half of these new works are of views of New York City. Just outside the gallery door is a painting of a reflected image framed by a piece by Mildred Beltré, with her studio on Governors Island in the background. Once inside the PlusSpace, to the far left, are the tall arched windows of the ceramic studio at Pratt, and a diptych of gated doors from a brownstone in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. The other paintings show scenes of Rome. The largest of these is a portal to an inner courtyard that has beckoned to me for over a decade along my walk on Via Garibaldi in Trastevere. The smallest piece is of the window above the bath in the Monte Verde apartment I shared with my nephew. Inside Outside Artemisia (Piazza Navona, Rome) is a beguiling view looking out on a reflected window in a Roman villa, which I spotted after looking at a marvelous exhibition of paintings by Artemisia Gentileschi.

Weather permitting, the PlusSpace at FiveMyles is visible to the public 24 hours a day, with a large scrim/garage door between the viewer and the installation. A passerby will feel as if they are peering through the space to a mysterious other world, with the perceptual shift heightened by looking into the gallery through a barred entry—a new manifestation of my body of work addressing the experience of wrongful incarceration.