Grief, distance, and connection: These themes run through the abstract paintings in Soleé Darrell’s latest solo exhibition, “Where You Need to Be: Studies in Teleportation,” on view through July 13 at pt.2 Gallery in Oakland, California. Guided by her intuition, the Bermuda-born, Bay Area-based artist expresses her style through this new body of work, a cosmic array of colors that dance with awakened confidence.
When I first met Darrell in 2018, I met a jewelry artist at his booth at the Renegade Craft Fair in San Francisco. More than five years later, the bright gemstones that once adorned her rings were alchemized into gem-toned pigments on velvet, and the geometric symmetry of her sterling silver necklaces expanded into the compositions of her large paintings. Ideas about spirituality that she had previously explored in metal were now reintroduced into new mediums.
These latest works, a new take on herself and her intuition, have caught the attention of the art world in the Bay Area and abroad. “Where You Need to Be” comes on the heels of solo exhibitions at San Francisco’s Legion Project and Tokyo’s Almost Perfect Place to Live. She is also participating in the 2024 Bermuda Biennale, Place, Being and Poetics, juried by artist Ebony G. Patterson and curator Helen Toomer, which will be on display at the National Gallery of Bermuda in January 2025 out. Additionally, Darrell was recently announced as a 2024 participant in San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) Annual Emerging Artist Program, where she will have her first museum exhibition this December.
pt.2’s work in particular exemplifies the self-taught artist’s desire to teleport from her home in California to her mom in Bermuda and her best friend in Brooklyn, both of whom were diagnosed last year breast cancer. “It can be painful to feel like you should be somewhere else. Whenever I paint, it’s the only time I feel like I’m able to escape myself and enter a different world,” Darrell said in a recent interview with Artsy. “It made me come to terms with what it means to be where I am.”
Although Darrell often experiments with different materials, incorporating beeswax, gold leaf, beads, wool, and other mediums into her practice, her vibrant color palette generally remains the same. However, “Where You Need to Go” departs from her familiar visual language, blending deep maroon and deep indigo so rich it almost looks black, as deep cave and There is a gap between heaven and us (All jobs through 2024). “I poured my sadness into my work and I was really worried that it was going to be very dark and different from what I usually do, which is usually very bright,” Darrell admits. “It’s interesting because deep cave and There is a gap between heaven and us I made it at the beginning of my journey. In both pieces, rich midnight tones surround a central point where electric blue and amethyst tones blend together. It’s unclear whether the darkness is expanding to engulf the bright spot, or if it is receding to give way to it.
The artist decided to paint on the textured surface of silk velvet, adding a sense of movement to Darrell’s gestural vignettes, an idea that came to her during a dream in 2021. outdoor, using your finger and paintbrush dipped in water. Sometimes she sprinkles paint directly onto the surface. The result is a kaleidoscope of free-flowing colors that pulsate, fade and interpenetrate, evoking a feeling of ephemerality and formlessness. Darrell’s more recent works have soft, organic forms that are very different from her earlier acrylic paintings on canvas, which felt restricted due to their defined edges.
In the second part of Darrell’s work, it becomes clear that grief, though sticky and dense, does not need to consume us. Take the captured upward energy as an example free, free, free or the energy that radiates where do you need to go. At the same time, in what’s leftA surface of lavender and aqua mist, with flecks of red smeared across an otherwise muted surface, as if to suggest that even fleeting moments can leave indelible marks that change us forever.
exist All About Love: A New Vision (2000), bell hooks writes, “Even if we don’t let it overwhelm us, grief may never leave us, and this is one way of honoring the dead and embracing them.” Darrell also reminds We, in everything we do, we always take our loved ones with us.
