Neely’s exhibition Sometimes a painting is a prayer materializes the interwoven experiences of intimacy, generosity and risk that shape her interior emotional and psychic life by debuting her largest painting to date in conversation with lithographic prints of personal journal pages and several works on paper. Standing at almost 33-feet in length, and 8 feet in height, Caught a glimpse is the sole piece hung in the main gallery, establishing a space of quiet that asks the viewer to attend to the sinuous, detailed renderings spanning its five panels. The painting eschews definitive readings, much like our continuous, non-linear aspirations toward wellness and the arduous exercise of finding ourselves again after heightened emotional release. Each life is fragile, threatened by its own ever-present capacity to break, and the lurking fear that rupture may not be followed by repair. In her work, Neely explores these complex, at times competing realities.
Excerpt from text by writer, curator and scholar Gervais Marsh, Ph.D., “Gestures of Interiority: Carmen Neely's Sometimes a painting is a prayer'”
Courtesy of Mariane Ibrahim.