A Shadow of Your Former Self/A Silver Sixpence in Your Shoe

Sunny Blue, Dilan Cheavacci, Lowell Horvitz, Ethan Kramer, Monty Laile, Lunch, Sasha Miasnakova, Hank Reavis, Tasneem Sarkez, Fiontan Staley, Eugene Terry, Andy Tousignant, Noah Trimble, John Yuyi

This Group Show, presented by Lilypad Magazine at SittingRoom, marks the launch of the 7th issue of the magazine. In A Shadow of Your Former Self/A Silver Sixpence in your Shoe, young artists from within Lilypad’s circle of past and current contributors each present two works. The works submitted respond to a prompt by the curator (Bergen Hendrickson) to collect something old and something new. The “old” works and “new” works are presented across the gallery from one another in a Jekyll and Hyde mirroring. This call to display works that may have been rendered obsolete by more up-to-date works—an exercise familiar for mature artist museum retrospectives but uncommon for younger artists—is indeed meant as a challenge. In asking the artists to address and reevaluate relics of their past that they’ve left behind, but might be willing to display in contrast to their current and future work, we ask them to practice acceptance of those relics as perhaps foundational to whatever it is they do now.

The title of the exhibition consists of two lines of a portmanteau hybrid rhyme, which combines the idiom referring to someone that pales in comparison to their former self with the final, lesser known line in the classic newlywed superstition about “something old, something new/something borrowed, something blue…” Firstly, the show playfully imagines the possibility of a shadow of one’s former self being seen in a positive light, as progression. Secondly, the show recalls those timeless, but hackneyed traditions of superstition that we use as talismans of success for setting out on life journeys as a possible example for how we might take our own early efforts as charged treasures to carry close at hand as we develop our work.

Many of the artists gathered in A Shadow of Your Former Self/A Silver Sixpence in your Shoe take on the prompt of new vs old with inventive interpretations. While “new” side works consist of both very recent artworks and even works-in-progress towards future plans in a live way, the “old” not only include works from college, adolescence, or a few years back, but also artifacts, ephemera, and receipts of moments, people, or ideas that, with the help of hindsight, become primordial predictors in the DNA of the present’s work.