Night Gallery is pleased to present a new body of work by Elaine Stocki, on view in our North Gallery chapel viewing room through June 15th. Stocki made her new paintings (all 2024) while in residence at the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Brooklyn, NY, which named her a 2023-4 awardee.

The paintings expand the artist’s ongoing explorations of materiality, abstraction, color, and form, which were at the heart of her previous solo shows with the gallery: Wild Braid (2023) and The Absolute Trick (2021). 

Stocki’s process-based paintings explore the interwoven nature of creation and destruction, beauty and decay. These dualities find their corollary in her deconstruction and reassembly of textile materials. Stocki references assemblage, Abstract Expressionism, craft traditions, and Color Field painting as she manipulates her central forms and their surrounds. Braids, taking their cue from poet Stanley Kunitz’s “wild braid of creation,” are a recurring motif throughout Stocki’s recent work; in her new series, the artist wraps her tondos with plaited canvas and painted denim.

In a 2023 review of Stocki’s work for the journal AEQAI, Joshua Beckelhimer wrote: “Stocki highlights the vexed relationships between nature, bodies, and power by deceptively organizing them.” The artist’s titles and hues connote earth and sky, ice and bog, while her forms betray the very physical, human endeavors of their making and unmaking: painting, tearing, wrapping, braiding, and tying.

For the artist, canvas, linen, and velvet are skins that can be stretched and manipulated. Wound and stretched around the frame of the tondo, the canvas skin extends and expands the life of the painting. The Shelter, for example, is divided into four quadrants with references to the four seasons and the four “humors” of medieval understandings of the body. The central “X” symbol is employed as both a warning and reminder of the mortality imbued within the beauty of the work.

When two disparate materials meet in Stocki’s paintings, puckering and tension results. This is especially evident in the sole square work in the new series: In Spinal, velvet strains as it meets the central “spine” of the painting. Tight stitching and loose threads coalesce as the artist herself negotiates between painterly control and release.