Grief, distance, and connection: These are themes that run through the abstract paintings of 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. The Bermuda-born, Bay Area-based artist was guided by intuition to create this new body of work, a dance of cosmic colors that evokes an awakened confidence.
I first met Darrell in 2018, when she was still working as a jewelry artist at her booth at the Renegade Craft Fair in San Francisco. More than five years later, the bright gemstones she once mounted in rings have been transformed into jewel-toned pigments, applied to velvet, and the geometric symmetries of sterling silver necklaces have expanded into the compositions of her large-scale paintings. Ideas about spirituality that she previously explored in metal now reappear in a new medium.
These latest works have given her a new confidence and intuition that has caught the attention of the art world in the Bay Area and abroad. “Where You Need to Be” follows solo exhibitions at the Legion Project in San Francisco and an almost perfect residency in Tokyo. She will also be included in the 2024 Bermuda Biennial “Place, Presence and Poetics”, juried by artist Ebony G. Patterson and curator Helen Toomer, which will be on view at the Bermuda National Gallery through January 2025. Additionally, Darrell was recently announced as a participant in the 2024 annual Emerging Artist Program at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco, where she will have her first museum exhibition this December.
The second section of works in particular stems from the self-taught artist’s desire to teleport from her home in California to her mother in Bermuda and her best friend in Brooklyn, both of whom were diagnosed with breast cancer last year. “It’s painful to feel like you should be somewhere else. Whenever I paint, I feel like I’m able to remove myself from my current situation and into a different world,” Darrell shared in a recent interview with Artsy. “It’s opened my eyes to what it means to be in the present moment.”
Although Darrell often experiments with different materials, incorporating beeswax, gold leaf, beads, wool, and other mediums into her creations, her vibrant color palette remains largely the same. However, “Where You Need to Be” departs from her familiar visual language with its blend of deep maroon and dark indigo, so rich that it almost looks like black. Deep cave and There is a gap between heaven and us (All works 2024). “I was putting my sadness into my work, and I was really worried that it was going to be really dark, which is different from what I normally do, which is really bright,” Darrell confessed. “It was interesting because Deep cave and There is a gap between heaven and us I created this at the beginning of my journey.” In both works, a deep midnight hue surrounds a central point, with large swathes of electric blue and amethyst hues blending in. It’s unclear whether the darkness is expanding to engulf this bright point, or retreating to make way for it.
Darrell’s gestural vignettes have a sense of movement, and the artist decided to paint on the textured surface of velvet, an idea she came up with during a dream in 2021. In her large-scale velvet works, she painted outdoorpainting with her fingers and a brush dipped in water. Sometimes, she splashes paint directly onto the surface. The result is a kaleidoscope of free-flowing colors that pulsate, fade, and bleed into one another, evoking a sense of transience and formlessness. Darrell’s recent works feature soft, organic forms that are a stark departure from her earlier acrylics on canvas, which were restrained by their sharp edges.
In Durrell’s second work, we can clearly see that sadness, though sticky and thick, does not need to consume us. For example, in Free, Free, Free Or the vitality Where you need to goAt the same time, What’s leftpatches of red cover the soft surface of lavender and light green haze, as if to suggest that even fleeting moments can leave an indelible mark and change us forever.
exist All for Love: New Horizons (2000), bell hooks wrote: “Grief never leaves us, even if we don’t let it overwhelm us, and this is a way to honor the dead, to embrace them.” Darrell also reminds us that everything we do is inseparable from the people we love.
