"SEAMS"
Ceres Gallery is pleased to present Seams, a solo exhibition by Atlanta based artist, Rae Broyles 85 IL.
Seams features work that addresses how women are truly holding on by a thread to maintain the fabric of our society. Woman are struggling to preserve their rights while still allowing themselves to be both fully feminine and yet strong enough to support important societal values.
In her seminal work, Sacred and the Thread, Broyles has gathered pieces of nearly forgotten history - old French library cards written in script, which like the physical library itself, will soon to be forgotten. The rag-tag skeletal structure of the garment in this work is a clear symbol of the tattered world in which we are currently living. The piece is also titled to reinforce the importance of artistic creativity and is sewn with red thread that is metaphorically holding us together as one spirit.
Then Rae Broyles turns to the realism of day-to-day struggles with the pieces, Hannah, and Barbie: Cutting Edition. The mental health situation we are living through is dire. Aside from countless mass-shootings, Broyles is also concerned with the pain of being a teenage girl today. She has watched young women turn to self-harm to deal with the pain and she is interested in bringing this situation to the attention of her audience.
Like a good book, Broyles also finds an element of surprise and redemption in the colorful work Resurrection where she assembles torn pieces of her father’s paintings that he created while deep in the throes of Alzheimer’s disease. A master illustrator in his own right, the paintings were all created over the last fifteen years of his life and have now been resurrected, giving them new life as part of Broyles work. With joy, yet painstaking handwork, she has sewn the symbolic pieces of his life back together in order to create a new and beautiful, yet still bewildering, whole.
In Seams, Rae Broyles also presents her poetry. Her exhibition is diverse, but it contains intensely interconnected narrative threads reflecting both disintegration and reclamation.
Rae Broyles currently lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia and has recently become a gallery artist at Ceres Gallery, New York.
Seams by Rae Broyles January 30 – February 24, 2024
Presented by Ceres Gallery
