The last time painter Brandi Twilley made headlines was in 2014, when she embarked on a portrait project with fellow artist Jennifer Rubell under the collaborative pseudonym Brad Jones. Her serial paintings of Rubell added depth to her largely self-reflexive portfolio. This July, Twilley is again at the center of attention with a personally loaded solo exhibition at Sargent’s Daughters in downtown Manhattan.Ten paintings comprise “The Living Room.” Identical in their dimensions, these horizontally skewed canvases present images from Twilley’s childhood home in Oklahoma, which burned to the ground in 1999. The 34-year-old artist reproduces the different rooms in part from memory and in part from photographs. Some Polaroids survived the fire, others she sourced from Google.The resulting paintings, rendered in murky blues, greens, and ochres, hang one after another, infusing the small gallery with a dolorous haze. Some show bedrooms plunged in darkness, scarred by water damage and scattered debris. Others depict the fire mid-blaze, wooden beds combusting into yellow and orange flames. The most intriguing works emit a glow from within, not unlike Vija Celmins’s “Heater,” 1963, which was on view at the Whitney’s recent exhibition “America Is Hard to See.” Twilley’s phosphorescent televisions, depicting Mario Brothers and a lonesome car, flood the rooms with a blazing twilight that seems to break through the painting’s fourth wall. Color dominates form, making Twilley’s empty rooms feel paradoxically alive.Her sullen “Christmas Tree,” 2015, opens the show. The gothic tableau resembles Diane Arbus’s “Xmas tree in a living room in Levittown, L.I.,” 1963, from her Guggenheim Fellowship project “American Rites, Manners and Customs,” and Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s equally eerie “Hartford,” 1978, from his “A Storybook Life” series. Unlike diCorcia and Arbus, who focused on documenting the lives of relative strangers, the tree in Twilley’s painting is presumably the one she grew up with. It is a recreation of the mind, not necessarily a stable moment frozen in time.And unlike semiskilled peers such as Jamian Juliano-Villani and Orion Martin, who tend to shear their found content from context, Twilley is generous with her narratives. She doesn’t strive for realism; instead she revels in vagueness and the repetitive nature of dreams. Is this the living room? Is this the living room? Is this the real living room? Circling around the truth, the show actualizes one of Emily Dickinson’s less encrypted couplets: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant —/ Success in Circuit lies.” From the tragic ashes, Twilley composes her most compelling self-portrait yet.
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