Corners Gallery is pleased to announce “Sweet Tender Love,” an exhibition by artist Kadie Salfi. Salfi will be showing a wide-ranging, space-filling show about family history and memory from Sept. 5 to Oct. 5. An opening reception will be held 5:30-7 p.m. Sept. 13.
Salfi said the exhibition is the culmination of years of delving into her family’s past:
“This exhibition is a product of many years of recollection and rediscovery. In 1998, I happened upon several reels of 16mm film in a family storage unit. On them were dozens of short clips of my grandparents, captured in the years immediately following World War II, in which my grandfather had flown 52 bombardment missions over Europe. Screening these clips at one of our annual family gatherings in California, with Frank Sinatra on the record player, was a singular, enchanting experience. I knew that one day, when the time was right, I would create a series of works to honor my family history and memory.
“During an artist residency in Vermont this January, after finalizing the details for my solo show at Brooklyn’s A.I.R. Gallery that was the culmination of a decade of highly-charged work about gun violence in America, the stars finally aligned for me to reach back into this more tranquil, private store of material and memories. The result of this cathartic and blissful process is not just a unique, thematic series, but a fully immersive, multi-sensory experience. The vibrancy and richness of my grandparents’ house as I remember it, always full of art and curios, is vividly evoked in the gallery space, which strains to accommodate the sixty-plus works that I created purposely for this show.
“These pieces range from monumental-scale screen prints and paintings derived from the footage I found to palm-sized gilded figurines of more allusive significance that are variously mounted like intimate offerings and arranged on rough-hewn marble slabs. Crooning background music, sweet treats including Mentos and Pound Cake and a 1976 Good Humor Truck on opening night will complete the encounter with nostalgia. “Sweet Tender Love” is my most deeply personal work ever, it’s also a celebration of the family bonds and the simple, sensuous joys of childhood that we all cherish. In that spirit of sharedness, I welcome you in!”
Using an appealing Pop palate, Kadie Salfi depicts objects of depredation, destruction, and desire. From her early silkscreens of bubblegum-hued bomber planes to her series of Arabian camels printed on brightly-dyed plaster with pure crude oil, Salfi presents trenchant social and personal commentary with a sly stylishness. Throughout the 2010s, she put American gun culture in the crosshairs: trophy species were rendered in Ben-Day dots and various models of firearms were painted with lustrous splashes of over-the-counter beauty products and captioned with unsettling statements of provenance or prophecy: “To kill his wife” or “To kill your daughter.” This ongoing project culminated in Every Sixteen Hours , a solo show at Brooklyn’s pioneering A.I.R. Gallery, after which Salfi reached back into her own family remembrances to create Sweet Tender Love , her most personal—and yet her most broadly resonant—series of work to date.
Born in Burlington, Vermont in 1972, Salfi studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and spent two years at Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles, where she printed editions of original graphics for such contemporary masters as Rauschenberg, Celmins, and Johns. Salfi maintains a steady studio practice in Ithaca, New York and has held numerous solo exhibitions on both coasts, including A.I.R. Gallery (Brooklyn), The Ink Shop (Ithaca), Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art (San Francisco), and BCA Center (Burlington). Her work has been discussed in Of Note Magazine, The Cornell Daily Sun, Chapter89 Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Artscope.
Corners Gallery is located at 903 Hanshaw Road, Ithaca, N.Y.
Featured image courtesy of artist’s social media page.