Reynolds Gallery is pleased to announce Amanda Valdez’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, which opens on Friday, September 11th with an all-day reception from 11am – 5pm and remains on view through October 30, 2020.

In First Home, Valdez presents nine works on canvas that incorporate a wide range of materials, including hand-dyed fabric, commercially sourced fabric, collaged oil stick on paper, and thread, and techniques including painting, drawing, quilting and embroidery. The artist also includes four gem-like works on paper in which she layers gouache, acrylic and graphite. Valdez explains, “Much of the work is a combination of embroidery, fabric, and oil stick on mounted paper. Several of the pieces, ongoing union, Reflect & Replicate, and Sweet Trouble, are exclusively fabric or fabric and embroidery, with these ones I felt called to let the color, pattern, and embroidery have space from the hand drawn elements of oil stick and allow for a minimal feeling to emerge or showcase the quilted elements without them having to negotiate hand drawn elements.”

Valdez created the majority of the paintings and works on paper during a time of quarantine, away from her regular studio, and there is a quietude and reflectiveness in the works that seems to mirror this time. Titles like Personal Revolution and Reflect & Replicate hint toward introspection and simplification. Valdez further elaborates in the below statement for the exhibition:

What I have to say about this body of work cannot be separated from the experiences of the last year. While I typically leave the abstraction as open to the viewer as possible and give poetic clues with titling, the intimacy of mothering my child in their first year, and enduring a shelter in place order that displaced my family is embedded in the shapes. Waves, curves, and bending shapes are being pulled up when I draw, their own signals of the loss of control and need for fluidity in taking each day as it comes. A curve is a response, it’s a movement in connection to landscape and the body. One I feel as the bodies between my son and I are still interwoven, yet the process of separation has begun. With this body of work I wanted to express a warmer color palette, while not exclusively that, it’s a feeling of being dewy, half lit in the fading deep night light, a way to make the shapes glow (“First Home”, “ongoing union”, “Reflect & Replicate”). While other moment of color call up chaos and staccato (“Burn Within”, “Braided Offering”).

– Amanda Valdez, 2020