To read my new feature article and interview “Two in One: Eve Ackroyd On Painting the Lives of Women in Their Minds and Out of Their Bodies” click on the link below:
Two in One: Eve Ackroyd On Painting the Lives of Women in Their Minds and Out of Their Bodies
By Stephen Wozniak
Eve Ackroyd: Second Body
May 2—June 27, 2024
TURN Gallery
32 East 68th Street
2nd Floor
New York, NY 10065
(917) 773-8263
turngallerynyc.com
“Every living thing has two bodies. To be an animal is to be in the possession of a physical body, a body which can eat, drink and sleep; it is also integrated within a local ecosystem, which overlaps with ecosystems that are larger and further away.”
—Daisy Hildyard, The Second Body
EXCERPT
There’s something both matter-of-fact and mysterious about the paintings that make up Eve Ackroyd’s new exhibition Second Body at TURN Gallery in Manhattan. Many of the works feature women engaged in acts of the everyday, from cocktail talk at a party of peers to cradling a newborn that’s fast asleep. Other pieces show animals that dwell in a place we think is a neighboring known or lead us into enchanted nighttime lands from which darkened dreams are made. The works in this intimate presentation are largely based on the artist’s varied South London lives as a mother-of-three, wife, sister, friend and neighbor. Indeed, there is a shuttling and shifting among character identities, relationships, activities and amorphous locales depicted in Ackroyd’s moody memorable pictures. They deal in the many interior and exterior worlds we inhabit—intimating there is an intrinsic overlap between the two, which essentially makes them one. Like the premise in Daisy Hildyard’s essay collection The Second Body, which suggests we survive in a movable symbiosis, tethered to each other upon networked grounds, Ackroyd’s art presents a fluid field where the narrow straits of you versus me transform into the open ocean of the collective, cooperative us—right here, over there and even far beyond the comfort of our front door. And without narrative, Ackroyd’s art ponders a remarkable moment between object and subject, between what we first see and how we fundamentally feel about it, as we slowly absorb her placid meditation on people both in and out of place.
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