Sometimes maligned as being too retro or stoner-y, beaded curtains announce the arrival (or departure) of a family member, a friend, a pet, often still clanging together long after they have passed through. In Seattle-based artist Madeleine Cichy’s solo show at Specialist, A Body as Big as This Room, the artist explores the bodily and responsive experience of the vintage decoration. Made over a three month period, most of the paintings are unframed and posted to the wall only tangentially, leaving the paintings sensitive to the way air moves through the space. Which kind of mimic the beaded curtains themselves.
Cichy told me that she was interested in the way that this "flexible architecture" responds to the bodies that move through it. The way the beads drape across your knee, then shoulder, then cheeks, then swoosh close behind you. It's a phenomenon that lasts for less than a couple of seconds, but she was interested in the trace left by these movements, painting the moment just before or just after something moves through it. You can almost hear the beads hitting one another, or see the way they glint in the light. There's this aspect of denial to the paintings, but that doesn't make them any less enjoyable to look at.
Riffing off of windows she found in colorful domestic paintings by French Post-Impressionist artist Pierre Bonnard, the backgrounds are hazy and bright, composed using acrylic wash. The background gives you the slightest context to the beads, which are considerably more vivid than the background and are painted with gouache, giving them a color-concentrated, lacquer-like quality.
In the painting above, she constructed the strings using a chalk line, snapping it against the paper and tracing over the random squiggles it made. Cichy tells me that she drew inspiration for the beads from objects around her studio: perfume bottles, keyholes, chromosomes (lol), macaroni, sausages, lemons, etc.
As a whole, the show is meditative. The contrast between the watery backgrounds with the sharpness of the curtains is comforting, familiar, loving. A Body as Big as This Room is up until January 25—don't miss it.
