December 7, 2024 – January 5, 2025
Taryn Möller Nicoll: Dreamgirlz presents oil paintings and mixed-media works on paper, Pop-inspired renderings of clandestine love affairs between one’s actual self and animagined ideal. Under Nicole’s skilled hand, the images can be read as courageous comments on female identity that, (as she says) “embrace techniques and images unfit for the gallery walls.”
As a young girl Möller Nicoll admired Britney Spears and the Spice Girls as signs of ultimate female achievement, powerful women and consumable sex symbols. Also an admirer of pop artists Alex Katz, Kehinde Wiley, and James Rosenquist, Möller Nicoll expertly merges skilled cartooning and realism to create visions of her “self” beside an idealized fictitious self. Her ideal self is “a hyperbolic flirtatious babe self, unhinged and undignified, representing superficial ideals established by the pop icons, supermodels and mass media of the late ’90s and perpetuated by reality-altering social media filters and AI machinations”
In thinking of herself as woman, friend, daughter, and mother, Möller Nicoll wants to share things she doesn’t want people to know about her. Her process is deliberately undignified: “I know I shouldn’t be holding myself to these idealized values, but there is a value of being desired like that, there’s something that’s pleasing to me.”
Sofia V Gonzalez: Accumulations brings a new series of wall sculptures to the gallery, thoughtful abstractions created with natural dyes, silk, and oak galls. The work reflects her studio practice while pregnant with her first babe; a visual reckoning through a year of becoming a new human’s home. Her transformation to motherhood expands her thoughts about place—and about climate change.
Gonzalez says: “I feel an urgency to record places I have known, from Northern California to Central Arkansas to San Diego, to embody the ways that locations shape me and the way I feel within them. Also to respond to the fear of climate change, what may happen when a place changes. My idea of home is expanding as I become a home for another person within our shared greater home of our outside environment. How can people be a place or hold an idea of place in addition to our physical surroundings? When do I become as local as the oak tree?”