NEW YORK, NY.- Sargent’s Daughters is presenting Stay With Me, Eve Biddle’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. In this intimate presentation, Biddle’s silk-screened photographs of local plants, rocks, and flowers become an growing archive of her way of seeing, capturing snapshots of place and intimate relationships with nature and landscape. Each is printed in saturated monochrome on an elliptical wooden panel, like windows or portals to particular moments in time.
Defined by their labor intensive production, Biddle’s ellipses are silk-screen printed by hand, not machine. The process requires two people pulling ink repeatedly across a lifted, tautly pulled screen, achieving the rich color saturation characteristic of Biddle’s work. Subtle bleed-throughs and moire patterns emerge naturally during printing, creating an index of human gestures and the unpredictable fluidity of the ink. These imperfections humanize and animate the digital images, embedding them with a sense of nostalgia while visibly recording the labor of everyone involved. The transformation from digital image to analog, handmade object both abstracts the image and clarifies its meaning and specificity.
Biddle’s images of local plants and budding flowers are strongly rooted in her close observation of the natural world, drawing inspiration from her immediate surroundings. Her practice spans across sculpture, photography, and many other forms of making. Much of her place-based work is shaped by time spent creating at the Wassaic Project, a Hudson Valley contemporary arts institution co-founded by Biddle to bring emerging artists together with local communities. Other works stem from time spent in Maine, a place of deep personal significance where she spent summers with her family as a child, and where she now returns with her own children. Biddle attributes her practice of constant looking, as well as the intertwining of her life and her work, to growing up in a family of artists. Having a photographer father fostered an early expectation that life might be reflected back through the camera’s lens, slightly transformed or reinterpreted.
Biddle’s elliptical prints encapsulate moments of transformation, both in form and in meaning. They enact the transformation of process, as digital images expand through labor intensive printing, while also capturing a moment in nature’s cycles of transformation through growth, beauty, and death.
Eve Biddle (b. 1982, Manhattan, NY) is a contemporary American artist and co-founder/co-director of The Wassaic Project, an arts organization.
Recent exhibitions include Sargent’s Daughters (Los Angeles, CA), The Museum of Art and Design (New York, NY), Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art (Buffalo, NY), Davidson Gallery (New York, NY), Williams College Museum of Art (Williamstown, MA), and Geary Gallery (Millerton, NY).
