This story was originally published by ArtsATL.
Honey Pierre’s solo exhibition “I’m Just Living Some Life, Okay?” at Impossible Currency gallery embraces mundanity and, through it, finds sublimity. The exhibition’s title — with its use of a first-person pronoun, vernacular English and an interrogative ending — make it the title seem like a shoulder shrug, as if the artist is saying, “What more can you ask of me?”
This exhibition begins by setting the scene, literally.
“Rainy Days in the Sunroom” (2025) features a planter resting on a countertop set against a window, beyond which stretches a verdant garden and precipitating clouds. Despite showing elements that allude to deep pictorial space, the lack of linear and atmospheric perspectives offers a flattened approach to an otherwise vibrant domestic scene.
Credit: Photo by Arshley Emile
Credit: Photo by Arshley Emile
This simplified aesthetic, one repeated throughout the exhibition, is powerful for its ability to create familiarity with the viewer through use of color and composition. Like the use of “just” in the title, this painting seems to imply that enough is enough. Rather than emphasizing grandeur, these works offer a humble embrace of the familiar.
This visual language and conceptual focus are continuations of Pierre’s career. For the last several years, the artist’s oeuvre has emphasized love and connection, particularly within the Black community, via the lexicon of weaving. As a medium that quite literally brings different strands together to create a stronger composite whole, weaving has proven time and again to be fruitful ground for Pierre to tell intergenerational stories.
This exhibition is noticeable for its emphasis on solitude. Many of the artworks were created following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, during a time when gathering and sharing were not safe. Using the same techniques in this exhibition, Pierre explores how solitude can bring solace.
Credit: Photo by Steve West
Credit: Photo by Steve West
The series continues with “Silent Seasons” (2024), in which a woman reclines on a couch with one arm drooping off onto the floor, spilling the beverage in her hand. The couch, covered with a striped blanket and pillows, is set in front of a background of gemstone-encrusted hearts.
The figure is rendered with punch-needle embroidery, giving it a soft yet textured appearance. A meticulous by-hand process, this weaving suggests a parallel to both the tenderness of humanity and the inescapable toiling of continuous living.
Here we find the “living” which, in an ironic twist, offers a less-than-vivacious composition. The figure is prone, perhaps from exhaustion. The drink is spilling without much reaction from the isolated figure. Despite the lack of motion in the scene, the work’s vibrant colors, eye-catching patterns and glittering rhinestones remind us to appreciate even life’s quietest and most prosaic moments.
Throughout the other 11 artworks on view, Pierre captures moments of everyday life, from a father reading to his children to a woman pouring herself a drink while she soaks in a bath. Featuring subjects that are familiar but not specifically recognizable, these works appear to be intentionally disconnected from personal identity. This is not a camera roll of Pierre’s personal life, but something more anonymous — and therefore universal.
Much like Pierre’s use of color and rendering as a means to create a sense of universal familiarity, so, too, do her compositions open the door for anyone to place themselves within. And it is in this familiarity and embrace of the mundane that sublimity is found.
While the use of “some life” in the title feels like a throwaway, the double entendre ultimately reads as a hopeful commentary about continued existence, asserting that there remains “some life” worth treasuring.
In this exhibition, even the most mundane moments have been captured and uplifted by Pierre, suggesting that we could do the same in our own lives. The challenge posed by the title’s question now reads as a call to action: We, too, are living some life, and isn’t it time we celebrated that?
EXHIBIT REVIEW
“I’m Just Living Some Life, Okay?”
Through Sunday, May 18 at Impossible Currency gallery. 3-7 p.m. Wednesday-Friday, noon-5 p.m. Saturday-Sunday. 3039 Peachtree Road N.E., Suite B200, Atlanta. instagram.com/impossiblecurrency
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Leia Genis is a trans artist and writer based in Atlanta. Her writing has been published in Hyperallergic, Frieze, Burnaway, Art Papers and Number: Inc. magazine. Genis is a graduate of the Savannah College of Art and Design and is an avid cyclist with a competition history at the national level.
Credit: ArtsATL
Credit: ArtsATL
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