Gallery One, Chicago
Western Exhibitions is pleased to present The Gloaming, Journie Cirdain’s second solo show with the gallery. Cirdain’s large allegorical drawings exist at the intersection of the human and animal, internal and external, magic and reality, and ultimately, life and death. The show opens on September 12 with a public reception and runs through November 1. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm. The show opens on September 12 with a public reception and runs through November 1. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm.
Another word for twilight is gloaming, which influences Cirdain’s almost exclusive use of a crepuscular value range of graphite. She meticulously renders moments of tension between the human and non-human, reimagining art historical subjects (still lives, nudes, and luxury items) as living participants in an enmeshed environment. With a film director’s focus on drama and a romantic flirtation with the macabre, her drawings betray an exquisite attention to light surface as a chandelier becomes an environment for cobwebs; a spiderweb glistens like crystal; a bouquet hangs next to the site of its extraction; an environment shows beheaded tulips. Her drawings engage with ideas about living and dying as entangled beings.
Journie Nikala Cirdain was born in 1993 in Santa Rosa, California. In 2017, she received her BA in Liberal Arts in the Great Books at St. John’s College and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has shown in exhibitions nationally and internationally, including The Green Gallery in Milwaukee, Elmhurst Art Museum in Illinois, A Gallery in Seattle, and in Chicago at Goldfinch and Patient Info. Cirdain lived and worked in Chicago for the past five years and is now on her way to Queens.