Bridget Bailey’s "March 2022 show at Femme Gallery in Nashville, Tennessee titled, “SWEET HEART EMAIL THREAD”. Consisting of thirty-eight pieces ranging in size, Bailey explores futurity through nostalgia, objects of the every day, and joy. The ranging sizes cover the room from floor to window, to ceiling. The title, “SWEET HEART EMAIL THREAD” comes from the Eileen Myles poem titled, “Sweet Heart” and an email thread between Bailey and some of their friends during their time working on their undergraduate degree in which they started the email thread with that poem.
Bailey states in their artist statement,
“My paintings are plastic spaces for soft collisions of objects, identity, decoration, the wearable, the malleable, screen space, imagined, and real space. I cultivate this space through material exploration that investigates a place between representation and material as material. These materials include canvas, air-dry clay, wax, caulk, spackle, paint, paper, collage, found objects and images, felt, and acrylic mediums and glues. My use of symbols and icons such as candles, balloons, streamers, and cakes speak to a habitual party or an any-aged-ness, in which ritual and perpetual and evolving personhood plays out, hinting at the joy to be found in queerness that has not yet fully arrived: I seek the intimacy of this world, the private self and the public self, and how those divisions can break down through dedication to play in the space of the painting.”
