Where the Waters Go
Adrienne Elise Tarver
May 16 - June 29, 2024
Opening Reception: Thursday, May 16th, 6-8pm
Address: 242 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011
Dinner Gallery is proud to present Where the Waters Go, an exhibition featuring new works by Adrienne Elise Tarver. This marks her fourth solo exhibition with the gallery which opens May 16th and will remain on view through June 19th with an opening reception on May 16th from 6-8pm.
Central to Tarver’s practice is an interest in the visibility and complexities of the black female experience. This new body of work explores the intersection of identity, interwoven narratives and aspirational spaces through the lens of complicated histories.
Recalling black actresses of the 1920s through 1960s, such as Dorothy Dandridge, Eartha Kitt, Lena Horne, and Hattie McDaniel, Tarver develops the narrative of her recurring fictional character, Vera Otis. Depicting scenes of leisure around the pool and tranquil interiors, Vera enjoys the comforts of a home that blends together historic imagery of the Tarver Plantation, a southern estate sharing the artist’s namesake, and iconic Hollywood residences. Here, Tarver uses these sources to confront the inherent dualities that exist within their historical backdrops and considers the origin stories as well as the power dynamics that have shaped these identities.
The color palette within Where the Waters Go signals a discrete shift for Tarver. A dreamy haze saturates her paintings as they converge and negotiate between multiple dichotomies - old and new, real and imagined, wild and manicured. Reminiscent of a distant memory reminding us of the past or perhaps a fading dream of the future, the shifting of liminality sheds light on the constraints and anticipations entwined within each realm.
Similar to Vera’s story, the artist is continually returning to her interest in the fraught histories of the tropics and subtropics as symbols of desire and aspiration. In looking at the voyeuristic tendencies and fantasies of exoticsim, long perpetuated by Western civilization, Tarver questions historical legacies and their ramifications.
Referring to Du Bois’s post-Reconstruction concept of double consciousness, a term used to describe the feeling of reconciling a person’s social role, identity and internal ambitions, Tarver reflects on a world of dueling physical and societal aspirational spaces. The house contains diverging perspectives of the slaver and enslaved while also unraveling the entanglements between public personas and private realities.
Through the eyes of Vera, emerges the imagined stories of the domestic laborer, the entertaining seductress, and the spiritual matriarch. Tarver continues to search for belonging by tracing her familial roots through this process, and uses Vera as a conduit for examining these spaces as well as embodying lost or unwritten stories. By doing so, she encourages viewers to contemplate the interconnectedness and intricacies of identity in contemporary society.
About Adrienne Elise Tarver
Adrienne Elise Tarver is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY with a practice that spans painting, sculpture, installation, photography, textiles, and video. Her work addresses the complexity and invisibility of Black female identity including the history within domestic spaces, the fantasy of the tropical seductress, and the archetype of the all-knowing spiritual matriarch.
She has exhibited nationally and abroad, including solo shows at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Connecticut; the Academy Art Museum in Maryland; Atlanta Contemporary in Atlanta, Georgia; Dinner Gallery (formerly Victori+Mo) in New York; Ochi Projects in Los Angeles; Wave Hill in the Bronx, NY; BRIC Project Room in Brooklyn; and A-M Gallery in Sydney, Australia and two-person exhibitions at Hollis Taggart in New York; Wedge Curatorial in Toronto, Canada. She recently received the Distinguished Alumni Award from her alma mater, Boston University, and the Nancy Graves Foundation Grant. She has been commissioned for projects through the New York MTA, the Public Art Fund, Google, Art Aspen, and Pulse Art Fair and has been featured in online and print publications including the New York Times, Forbes, Brooklyn Magazine, ArtNews, ArtNet, Blouin ArtInfo, Whitewall Magazine, and Hyperallergic, among others. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and BFA from Boston University.