after a bit of a delay hidell brooks is absolutely thrilled to open the last exhibition of 2021 for selena beaudry and barbara campbell thomas. roommates back in the day at penn state school of visual arts both artists have always bonded over their shared love of creating insanely intricate artwork. a few years ago we asked them if they would like to have solo shows together after all this time of being huge admirers of each other paintings. they jumped at a the chance and were once again charged by their connection to create new bodies of work. through deconstruction of materials they recreate paper, canvas, and fabric into painted collages formed from their unique visions. the collage work pulsates with all the maniac energy used to tear, cut, sew, glue, paint, and draw during the process. selena beaudry and barbara campbell thomas shared commitment to their studio practice is on full display.
selena beaudry lives and works in london and received her mfa from tyler school of art in philadelphia, pennsylvania. her work consist of PILES™, cut out collages and oil paintings. the focus of her paintings is color through loose gestural brushstrokes. her PILES™ and cut out collages are intricate, delicate and precise as they weave across the paper. also included in the exhibition are two custom rugs based on selena’s coveted collages designed in tandem with christopher farr out of london.
i created this body of work during covid-19 lockdowns in london. the city was shut down except for parks, pharmacies, and grocery stores. i couldn’t go to my studio, so i started drawing at home and going for long walks. during walks i found i was noticing new things — things i passed by in the hurried pace of pre-pandemic life and in being a working mother of three. london’s parks came to life for me and its wonderful green spaces. i spent time sitting and listening to birds. i experienced the most beautiful springtime weather, more pleasant than any i could remember in the eight years i had lived in london. i watched the trees bud, flowers bloom and enjoyed the spectacular colors in different shades and varied light. the sights and experiences began to translate into my drawings through color, mark making and space. i began to make more intense and varied marks with pencil and paint. and, the anxiety of the unknown brought about by the pandemic, the boredom, and the claustrophobia, began to make their way into my drawings.
in summer 2020, london began to reopen, and i headed back to my studio. i experienced an explosion in creativity. with space to move, i was able to make again, see and get bigger. zoning into my new drawings, i began cutting up busy, frenzied marks and made paper and linen pallets that related to them. i connected with the pallets on the floor while creating new collages, making them more complex. i remembered my walks and brought them into the works — the budding trees, the flowers blooming. my eye kept returning to the floor, and i realized i wanted to explore the floor. the floor!
at first, i envisioned a paper piece that spanned the entire studio. i have always loved materiality and using new mediums to translate my work. i referenced an image by cecily brown. i remembered one of her works, a painting on the floor, but then realized it was a rug. i then imagined two rugs for this show. one is based on a piece i made specifically with a rug in mind “with a capital p.” i explored what would happen if i hung a piece of artwork and positioned a mirror image of it on the floor in front of it. how would they speak to one another? the second rug is based on an older piece of mine titled “her hair fell in her face.” this artwork inspired my new collages, and i wanted its likeness to sit and talk with these new works. revisiting this work and exploring its nuances felt like taking my pandemic walks and celebrating the budding spring in london — seeing anew.
the covid-19 pandemic came with great loss and uncertainty, however, the bright spot for me was more time — time for family, time to think, time to slow down to see and make. i circled back to old ideas and improved them by investigating, layering, and making more complex works. i am grateful to see again in a new/old and exciting way.
-selena beaudry 2021
barbara campbell thomas's work combines painting with quilting, overlaying their material vocabularies to create complex formal dialogues within each painting that resonate with the details of her own life and the history of each medium. she came relatively late to quilting, which she learned from her mother, but quickly realized its power as an art form traditionally practiced by women to inform and expand the range of painting.
barbara’s paintings have been exhibited in museums and galleries across the united states: at the weatherspoon art museum, the painting center, the atlanta center for contemporary art, the southeastern center for contemporary art and the north carolina museum of art. she has been an artist-in-residence at the hambidge center for creative arts and sciences, the skowhegan school for painting and sculpture and, in 2021, she attended the elizabeth murray artist residency. she is a recent recipient of a north carolina artists fellowship.
barbara campbell thomas is an associate professor of art in the school of art at unc greensboro. she lives and works in climax, nc.
barbara campbell thomas’s paintings harness geometric abstraction and a materially rich surface of paint, collage and sewn fabric to explore how the everyday experience of living and being is an arena for spiritual perception. in her new body of work, created for the artist’s first solo exhibition at hidell brooks gallery in charlotte, north carolina, barbara campbell thomas mines commonplace rhythms that have the capacity to transport us, even (perhaps especially) during times of isolation and quarantine.
two experiences anchor this body of ten paintings: campbell thomas’s decades long love of reading and her recent commitment to the study of movement and breath through yoga. the artist believes that learning to read when she was a child continues to be one of the most important experiences of her life. reading was her initial pathway into the imagination, to worlds that existed beyond daily life. reading also offered the artist her first inkling that one could actively cultivate a rich, interior life. many of the paintings in rhythms for transport play with the visual structure of books—the symmetrical spread of an open book is loosely referenced in paintings like line and two routes. the innate rhythmic quality found in lines of text provide the inspiration for the stacked, cadenced interplay of sewn strips of fabric in blaze and the show’s titular work, rhythms for transport. sky book, the largest painting in the exhibition, is an imaginative foray into the question, what if the sky was a book?
all the paintings in rhythms for transport are infused by barbara campbell thomas’s commitment to serious yoga study, which began during the early days of the pandemic. as zoom offered the opportunity to study with a beloved, masterful teacher living many states away, campbell thomas was able to cultivate a daily yoga practice which came to be an extension of her painting practice. just as the adamantly physical materials of paint, canvas and fabric are a vehicle for exploring what it means to be, learning the flowing, rhythmic movements of the human spine through yoga practice is revealing new connections between body, mind and spirit. these conversations between painting and yoga, moving and being are joyful ones for the artist, and the ecstatic, color-saturated surfaces of her paintings reveal this deep delight.
all available work by selena beaudry + barbara campbell thomas can be viewed on our website under their individual artist tab including sizing + pricing. hidell brooks gallery is by appointment only. please call the gallery if you have any further questions.