Press Release

Mrs. is pleased to share a solo presentation of new paintings by Meghan Brady for Independent New York, 2022.

It makes all the sense in the world that Meghan Brady’s studio occupies a former classroom in a defunct Victorian high school in a proud seaport town on the coast of Maine. (A school that once counted among its pupils the young Ukrainian émigré Leah Berliawsky, who would reinvent herself in America as the artist Louise Nevelson). The studio is infused with the familiarly comforting odors of oil paint, linseed oil, turpentine, fabric, paper, glue. Somewhere at a deeper foundational strata undergirding Brady’s sensory landscape of materials, colors and images, are the faint echoes and aromas of one hundred and twenty-eight years of endless school days. Seemingly embedded in the wooden floors and plaster walls one can almost sense the volumes of cursive ink and pencil graphite worn away, the shear tonnage of eras of paper composition books and mountains of chalk dust ground against tablets. There are generational echoes of hard work, of learning, struggling, moments of blinding enlightenment or frustrating bafflement and monotony, of necessary failing and blissful succeeding, of boredom, inspiration and goofing off, of punishments and play and secrets. Notes passed between desks with scribbled drawings or missives of conspiracy, mockery, and love, telegrammed from point to point, the contents forever lost, but forever circulating. 

There is a distinct call-and-response between those ghosts of hard work, endeavor, making, expressing, fearing and hoping and what happens now in this large creaky room. Brady is a native New Englander, and perhaps therefore a thrifty magpie when it comes to approaching her self-invented inventory of imagery, creating whole worlds out of humble and familiar scraps, the way an expert quilter uses a carefully, insistently choreographed patchwork of bits and pieces of matter gleaned from the archaic former world to construct magnificent new ones. She is also a painter’s painter, who – like a Philip Guston or a Joan Mitchell – comes equipped and ready to do a job, to be patient with an ancient practice that is eternally puzzling and confounding, but unafraid of a barroom brawl if it means teasing exuberance, mystery and glimpses of revelatory giddiness into being. Painting is the stuff of hard work because, as Brady put it, it is a call and response activity with yourself, as both the maker and the witness of your own gestures, instincts and decisions. 

The first time I saw them, Brady’s canvases (nearly all squares, or rectangles almost chagrined to be anything other than equilateral), with their flattened out areas and zones of saturated color, their circles and dots, their matter-of-fact oblong and patterned geometries, their frequent sinuous pathways promising a narrative, reminded me of flags, heraldic shop signs, banners, pennants, protest placards, fortune teller cards, and especially old obscure 19th and 20th century game boards. Such artifacts were pieces of timeless folk art in the process of being formalized into a modern visual culture. But the mysteries of their segmented geometries, their practical symbols and demarcations signifying abstruse rules, codes, meaningful sequences and processes, delineating this and that, here and there, self and other, beginning and end. But in the case of Brady’s canvases, there is no decisive beginning or end. Or easily deciphered messages. They are, as she describes them, forms of signaling, to herself and others. Like the iconography of semaphore flags, they feel the urge to be relatable, friendly, alluring, eye-catching, at times, by rights, joyous. But always operating at a level of communication just this side of inscrutable and resistant to reductive decoding. The rules, the limitations imposed by the hard-stop edges, are liberating bounds to the syntax within. 

Like the patchwork quilter’s bushel of castoff scraps, Brady has a treasure trunk of motifs and persistent ciphers, symbols and pictorial talismans that tug at her sleeve, totemic forms that appear, disappear for a time, and then strut back onstage in new incarnations and arrangements from painting to painting. The paintings are not intended as serial or episodic, but they do talk to each other. There are crowns (the stuff of royals or paper birthday party ephemera), cartwheels and pinwheels, citrus-like wedges, and square, triangular and semi-circular solids that have the elemental simplicity of kindergarten blocks and the immediacy of construction paper projects. There are rusty oxidizing suns, with childlike rays, blazing over patterned chromatic grounds of ocre or muddy plum, or confounded by benthic hedgerows of lapis, blood orange and putty. And there is overwhelmingly the stuff of the body: Hands, fingers, eyes, noses, awkward heads rubbing noses. There are creatures and animals and beasts mingling with the human in here too. In these windows. Winged things. But it’s not that easy. In Brady’s bestiary, wings become hands, fingers become feathered wingtips - like kids making shadow puppet plays with their hands by candlelight. All are mere shapes and forms, abstracted, abstracting. Flattened out, simplified down to their basic constituent overlapping and interlocking geometries, the paintings have the assembled, constructed, layered look of collages, as if her oil painted chevrons and punctuation dots and zigzags and crenulated bands of corbellings had been carefully cut from bolts of fabric or sheets of scrap paper rather applied with a brush. The parts jostle and swap themselves around to form a compatible, viable whole, executed in a calculatedly rough, imprecise fashion, off-kilter and cheek-by-jowl, toying with and ignoring obvious symmetries and presumptions of order, the way ordinary people making hasty signs, improvised posters, amateur theatrical backdrops. The talismanic snakes and serpents that appear periodically from canvas to canvas may be reminiscent of the sequential steps and missteps lying in wait in the old snakes-and-ladders games of bygone eras, but in their contortions and writhings, their prodding and pushing against the frame of the canvas this way and that, they offer a compelling visual testimony to the decisions and assertions and hard-won moments of absolute conviction of the painter, who continues, unflappable, sending out signals to herself and the world.
-James Trainor

Meghan Brady received her BA from Smith College and her MFA from Boston University. She was the 2017 recipient of the Ellis Beauregard Foundation Grant and a 2018 Hewnoaks Summer Fellowship, as well as a 2019 MacDowell Fellowship. Recent exhibitions include The University of Tulsa, Tulsa, OK; Steel House Projects, Rockland, Perimeter Gallery, Belfast and Portland Museum of Art, Portland; Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME; Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, New York, NADA House, Governors Island, Anderson Gallery, Buffalo, Mrs., Maspeth, and a residency/exhibition at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Brooklyn, NY, which received a mention by The New York Times. Her first solo exhibition at Mrs. was held in September 2020. Brady's work has also been included in a two person exhibition with Carolyn Salas in the summer of 2018, and presented by Mrs. at NADA House on Governors Island, spring/summer 2019. Her work resides in the Fidelity Investments Art Collection, Boston, MA, SoHo House Art Collection, Brooklyn, Collection Francis J. Greenburger, New York and New York Presbyterian Hospital Collection, New York, NY. Brady lives and works in Camden, ME.

For more information please contact hello@mrsgallery.com.