Sim Smith is delighted to present ‘Star-Studded Canopy’, the debut solo exhibition by British artist Daisy Parris at the gallery.
This new work was finished just before the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown and the show was supposed to open just after mandatory quarantine started. With various restrictions continuing, Star-Studded Canopy is now an exhibition that is, by default, only accessible online to a homebound audience. Quite apt for a show that deals with the highs and lows of human existence and psychological space, the exhibition will open online on June the 11th on our website sim-smith.com. The title of the show alludes to an autobiographical moment in Parris’ teenage years, sitting on the floor underneath a star-studded canopy in a room at home where she learnt to paint.
This solo exhibition has been long in the making, a vernacular that has developed through experience, relationships, through the depths and the peaks of her human existence thus far. Intimacy distinguishes Parris’ practice, through her paintings we feel what she feels, we cry, we bleed, we smile. She brings insight and integrity to her paintings with great psychological and emotional force. Her work is imbued with the sensitivity of one who feels everything, taking us through unflinching narratives across psychological space and moments of reflection and tenderness. An ode to human existence, her work is sometimes silent, sometimes savage, with paintings that construct self-portraits of personal battles and triumphs in a fast moving yet contemplative assault on the canvas.
For her first solo show at the gallery, Parris will present paintings from the modest to the mammoth. These are paintings of transition, of psychological change and painterly evolution. There are quantifiable shifts of mood within the works; small direct text-based paintings asking ‘Does Everyone Ache?’ like a mirror held up to the population, a 5 meter canvas which attacks itself in a battle of intense creeping paint and hopeful explosions of colour and paintings that feel as if sunlight is warming your face through the branches of a tree. Oil paint sits heavy on delicate tendrils, marks that crawl, creep and break. Sometimes they surrender under the sheer weight of what is put on top of them and sometimes they multiply, taking over until they dissipate into the raw, naked canvas beneath. Murky pond-like greens and browns hit lurid, sickly pinks and purples, broken against the paranoid movement or red scratching marks that live on the works like lichen. It is a question of what will win, the light or the dark, the day or the night, the good or the bad? Parris’ paintings expose us to the expansive possibilities of the heart and mind, the ups, the downs and importantly, the moving through. There is great strength to the work, to the message and to Parris herself; a lesson in survival, in feeling, and in the honest act of revealing ourselves and our emotions.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Daisy Parris (b. 1993, Kent, UK) lives and works in London, UK. She holds BA (Hons) Fine Art from Goldsmiths University, London. Recent exhibitions include Talk Like Strangers, with Nico Stone, Sebastian Helling and Jesse Littlefield, Part 2 Gallery, Oakland, California, What Kind Of Spirit Is This?, Sim Smith, London and Poem, Las Palmas Project, Lisbon.
