December 5, 2020 — January 2, 2021
Been on My Way
Desireé Vanieica
Conduit Gallery is honored to announce Been on My Way, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Dallas based artist,
Desrieé Vaniecia. The exhibition will be the first at Conduit Gallery for the artist.
Every defender, need a eulogy
I give my heart in perpetuity
To all the stars from my community
That ain't never got to shine and glisten.
Tobe Nwigwe, We Got Next (2019)
In Been on My Way, five large scale-female figures depicted in Flashe paint on linen are larger than life and reside in their respective compositions in various states of seated pose. As a body of work, the paintings are an ambitious project conceptualized by Vaniecia and created with funding awarded the artist by the Dallas Museum of Art’s Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough Award in early 2020.
Together, the five abstracted portraits represent the culmination, or as Vaniecia states, “the final exam” for the previous three years of her explorations of maternal influence and representations in popular culture of the black female form. Vaniecia, an artist known for her bold and elegantly pared-down compositions of black female figures, began this body of work with a photograph of her maternal grandmother in her early 20s. With this as the first of five depictions, Vaniecia continued to add portraits of women that reference her personal journey through life to date. Each painting depicts a woman in Vaniecia’s life that has pushed not only the artist, but the artist’s entire family, forward. The action of commemorating through paint, compels the artist’s intention that she for her own part continually push legacy and family forward for future generations. In addition to the five large canvases, a suite of smaller paintings that represent personal objects related to each woman will be on view.
While the paintings in the exhibition depict very specific individuals and relationships, Vaniecia’s formal choices in rendering the figures with simplified features and solid blocks of color compels each viewer to bring their own relational considerations to the work and weave together the universal with the personal.
Desireé Vaniecia was born in 1990 in Dallas, Texas. She earned a BFA in Graphic Design from McMurry University in Abilene, Texas in 2013 and has since shown throughout the north Texas region in such exhibitions as Our Faces, Our Voices (2020) at the Fort Worth Community Arts Center, Fort Worth, TX (curated by Raymond Wyatt and Shauna Benoit); Vibrant Thang (2020) at 500X Gallery, Dallas, TX (curated by Ciara Elle Bryant); Sensibility: revealed truths, tensions and vulnerability (2020), ART ROOM, Fort Worth, TX (juried by Taylor Barnes); ART 214 (2019) and Bath House Cultural Center, Dallas, TX (curated by Susan Lecky).