July 24 - September 16, 2024
📍Amie Wine Studio, 13 Eccleston Yards, London SW1W 9AZ
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Salon 21 is pleased to present “Do I Dare Eat A Peach?,” a group presented at amie wine studio, opening to the public on Wednesday, July 24, 2024. The exhibition is a celebration of gathering, consumption, and aging, seen through the lens of five emerging female artists who are based in the U.S. and U.K.

The exhibition opens on July 24th and runs through September 16th. Please visit Amie Wine Studio’s website for hours of operation.

This exhibition looks at food as a site from which to explore complex relationships surrounding both nourishment, aging, pleasure, and knowledge-sharing. The title of the show, taken from T.S. Eliot‘s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is the departure point for the curator’s thinking. The main character Prufrock grapples with fear of what others might think, especially in his interactions with women. Daring to eat a peach is symbolic of these anxieties, a fruit which also has a sensuous, feminine connotation. Exploring this theme through the lens of female artists, the exhibition depicts scenes of women gathering, as well as food and drink. Women are seen reclaiming their sensuality by asserting control over their own narratives and representations. The artists, through their work, confront and redefine societal taboos and stereotypes associated with female gathering, transforming these spaces into empowering expressions of identity and community. They also examine bodily stereotypes and the gendered associations around eating disorders with societal perceptions of a woman’s appearance. Consequently, our appearance becomes a focal point of judgment and comparison. The artworks, which range from paintings to ceramics and sculpture, collectively work to reshape perceptions and empower women’s representations in art and society.

Installed at Amie Wine Studio – a wine bar, wine shop, and art gallery located in Eccleston Yards (Belgravia, London) – the exhibition is perfectly suited to its environment. The aim is for visitors to slow down and sit awhile with a glass of wine, a bite to eat, good company, and reflect on the artworks.

A percentage of sales will be donated to Amie’s charity partner, charity: water, whose mission is to bring clean and safe water to every person on the planet.

Featuring:

Click to expand artist bios.

Carly Owens Weiss

Carly Owens Weiss is a multidisciplinary artist based in Boulder, Colorado. As an artist, Weiss

is interested in the violence of contrasts and navigating the feelings that arise in a place where the familiar or mundane are juxtaposed with something unusual. The tensions between comedy and tragedy, femininity and masculinity and seduction and repulsion greatly informs her work. She utilizes recognizable objects, often food or domestic themed, and gives the viewer access to a realm in which these objects become irrational and strange. Weiss often draws parallels between these objects, the body and the experiences lived within them to create contemporary vanitas imagery. The investigation of surface is paramount to her practice. Her pieces are rendered beautifully to momentarily distract the viewer from the dark complexities that lie beneath the surface. Thematically, she confronts contemporary issues of womanhood, longing and belonging and expectations of gender through a personal and symbolic lens.

Janie Korn

Janie Korn is an American, London-based contemporary artist whose intricate candle sculptures delve into the ephemerality of memory and the richness of folklore. Through her meticulous wax creations, she captures the transient power of recollections, which, like her sculptures, gradually melt away. Influenced by storytelling traditions, each piece is a fragment of the real and imagined lore. Korn's evocative work has been featured in numerous exhibitions, inviting audiences to reflect on the delicate interplay between impermanence and myth. Her most recent body of works explore folklore from within. Using hand built ceramics, she re-imagines artifacts that would be found inside the imaginary palaces and kingdoms of these same fairytale stories. These pieces are patinated to appear as recently discovered relics.

Morgane Richer La Flèche

Morgane Richer La Flèche is a Canadian-born, New York-based multidisciplinary artist. A self-taught artist, she works primarily in oil paint, pastels, soft sculpture, and video. She is inspired by the world-building of Florine Stettheimer and Lewis Carroll, the theatrical arts, lyric poetry, French literature, her Catholic upbringing, body horror, and the Rococo period. Her work is visceral, as in pink for flesh and red for blood, as in decadence of excess but also of decay and decomposition. Whether in paint, pastel or wool felt, her textures are simultaneously viscous and diaphanous. While her paintings are steeped in narrative, she plays with abstraction to create sinister landscapes that are always swirling, deteriorating and melding—a nod to hyperspace, virtual realities, and the architecture of cathedrals arching towards heaven.

Danielle Kosann

Danielle Kosann is a painter based in Connecticut, USA with roots in photography and new media whose cinematic, textured, and vibrant paintings feature whimsical worlds of fantastical creatures and imagined destinations. Working with oil and acrylic on a large scale, she weaves intricate female-centric narratives within her paintings, which are often tinged with humor and satire. She playfully uses references from theater, film, books, architecture, and art history in order to create imaginary worlds that feel familiar and nostalgic to us, while playing on our desire and longing to escape. Throughout her paintings, she explores narratives through which women can thrive without the constraints of a society laden with barriers. Kosann’s work is admired for its detailed and immersive worlds that create a sense of place in an interior that engages, inspires and captivates the viewer. Kosann’s paintings are sold in a gallery at the iconic Bergdorf Goodman store in New York City, and she recently had her first solo exhibition at Rosenbaum Contemporary Palm Beach in February 2024. Her work is also on permanent view at The Carlyle Hotel in New York City.

Zennie Thomas

Zennie Thomas is a painter based in London who works mainly on acrylic on canvas and paper. Her work explores womanhood through emotion and memory often set in a dream-scape, theatrical landscape. Exploring mainly female relationships and emotion, her paintings feature themes of the ethereal and melancholy. Thomas’ work invites the viewer to take their own interpretation of what they are viewing. She has exhibited her work in group shows at Black White Gallery 2022 and Eve Liebe Gallery 2023.