Serena Stevens
Iowa Dream
July 12 - September 12, 2020
Stevens paints intimate spaces and nondescript objects of everyday life: her studio, her bedroom,
her garden, a shower curtain, a desk, a stack of suitcases, a disheveled bed taken over by a cat.
Vacillating between experience and memory, surface and subject, these are slow paintings, made softly
and hazily, where the familiar and overlooked trace the contours of a private world.
"Iowa Dream" is a show of large-scale, unrushed, and unpopulated paintings, at once personal and neutral, humane,
observant and SLOW. Paintings that are simultaneously empty and loaded, and that are best experienced one-on-one,
by viewing in a real (physical) space. Quiet paintings that risk being rendered invisible amidst the digital fog, or suffocated
by the frenetic, figurative, pop-infused iconography of art optimized to perform online.
"If you slow things down, you notice things you hadn't seen before." - Robert Wilson
Serena Stevens was born in 1988 in Fort Madison, Iowa. After spending six years living in Southern California,
New Mexico, and then New England, Stevens returned to Iowa, to paint the distance between past and present
and the discomfort of familiarity. Her project of self-reflection is to mark the changes in her own perspective after
her departure from and return to her home. Her paintings index her efforts to see anew her personal and private spaces
and surroundings.
I think of home as both a place and a feeling, something both fleeting and everlasting. A source of potential comfort
or contempt, a home sinks in its roots while remaining utterly receptible to being uprooted.
The life-size scale of Stevens' paintings creates an alluring space, even as the frenetic softness of her brushstrokes
invites viewers to remain focused on the surface of the canvas. This tension, which arises from the nature of painting
itself, resonates with Stevens' own exploration of place, presence, and belonging.
The show shares its title, "Iowa Dream," with the newest posthumous album of avant-garde musician and Iowa
native Arthur Russell (1951-1992). In 1973 the cellist, composer, singer and producer relocated from Oskaloosa to
New York, where he was a prolific participant and collaborator in lower Manhattan's experimental music and disco
scenes, and the music director of The Kitchen.
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An exhibition by Serena Stevens "Ceiling Fan Painting" is currently on view at The National Exemplar in Iowa City.
The show features a single painting in a room. A life-size painting of the ceiling fan of The National Exemplar Gallery
in Iowa City (Ceiling Fan, 2020), installed in said room.
Serena Stevens
installation view
Serena Stevens
installation view
Serena Stevens
installation view
Serena Stevens
installation view
Serena Stevens
installation view
Serena Stevens
Rocking Chair
2020
oil on canvas
72 x 60 inches
Serena Stevens
Red Door
2020
oil on canvas
82 x 60 inches
Serena Stevens
Sit on It
2020
oil on canvas
72 x 68 inches
Serena Stevens
Spare Bed
2020
oil on canvas
80 x 72 inches
Serena Stevens
The Gallery
2020
oil on canvas
72 x 74 inches
Serena Stevens
Light Inside
2020
oil on canvas
82 x 60 inches
Serena Stevens
Kylie
2019
oil on canvas
72 x 90 inches
Serena Stevens
Suitcases
2019
oil on canvas
60 x 84 inches