Daisy Sheff

Parker Gallery is proud to present Begun in the Dazzling Sunshine, Daisy Sheff's first solo exhibition at the gallery and one of two solo exhibitions inaugurating Parker Gallery's 6700 Melrose location. Featuring new paintings and sculptures made across the artist's studios in Marin County and Los Angeles, this exhibition expands upon Sheff's lexicon of folklore, literature, fashion history, utopian aesthetics, and the domestic familiar. Her paintings vastly range in scale and material, and related sculptures use found materials and florid colors to animate the artist's cohesive worldview.

A California native, Sheff's paintings draw from deep connections to landscape and the order of the natural world. The paintings are segmented into geologies of muted colors, an organizational principle that allows small narratives to emerge concurrently. Certain corners may be ornamented in beads or traces of paper collage, while other coves reveal figures and text. The undulating waves of color function like the bogs of fairytale lands– obscuring and allowing for discovery simultaneously. The presence of animals, especially dogs, reveals a sensitive outlook on the hierarchies of nature. Flowers overtaking space offer temporary respite, but also a creeping foreboding about the unconfined transformational power of living organisms. The found elements of Sheff's paintings and sculptures further question the idea of natural, flourishing from the immediacy of place and building her surfaces with uniquely resonant textures.

Sheff's work extends into the foundational principles of fashion, craft, and theater design. Many of the compositions function like a staged landscape in which fantastical characters emerge and retreat. The characters of her work are adorned in anachronistic outfits, alluding to fairytale fantasies but also the unrestricted pleasure of Rococo billowing fabrics and 2010s Marc Jacobs pilgrim shoes. The influence of textile patterning can be found in the artist's structured flowering vines. Modest woodworking and weaving details in the paintings and sculptures recall hippie craft guides and Whole Earth Catalogue aesthetics, movements historically rampant across the communities of California where Sheff lives and works.

The domestic world of women and pets are central in Sheff's storytelling. Specifically, Sylvia Townsend Warner's 1926 novel Lolly Willowes provides an important precedent, locating the phantasmagorical in the experience of spinsterhood. Sheff focuses on homey scenes of steaming pots and enticingly warm stove tops, yet her tableaus are never static. Her witchy homemakers fan out into exuberant fantasy worlds, never constrained to a single reality. A new character in Sheff's recent body of work is a kindly woodland sorcerer, reminiscent of benevolent heroes in children's tales and fantasy novels. He and leaping dogs serve as our lighthearted guides to the rituals of Sheff's eerie and euphoric universe.

Based in Los Angeles and Inverness, CA, Daisy Sheff (b. 1996, Greenbrae, CA) received her BFA from UCLA in 2018. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at Clearing, New York/Brussels/Los Angeles; Ratio 3, San Francisco; South Willard, Los Angeles; and White Columns, New York. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Venus Over Manhattan, New York; MarinMOCA, San Rafael, CA; Pace Gallery, Hong Kong; Gordon Robichaux, New York; Parker Gallery, Los Angeles; and Grimm Gallery, New York. Daisy Sheff's work belongs to the collections of the de Young Museum, San Francisco; The Bunker Artspace, West Palm Beach; the Rachofsky Collection, Dallas; Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; and Igal Ahouvi Art Collection, Tel Aviv.