Brandi Twilley’s 2016 exhibition at Sargent’s Daughters, titled The Living Room, consisted of ten paintings depicting the living room of the artist’s childhood home, which burned down when she was 16. The paintings chronicle the state of the living room across several years of the artist’s life, including in the midst of the blaze. While each painting has a similar composition showing 3 walls of the living room, every angle of the room is depicted. The 360-degree nature of the exhibition seemingly converts viewers into three-dimensional scanners, observing every inch of Twilley’s living room.
The present lot, Smoke and Rain Buckets, 2016, is one of the depictions of the room before the fire. Water-stained wood paneling constitutes most of the background, fading to darkness on the left side. The only light source seems to be the sunlight creeping in through the gap between a plywood sheet and the edge of an empty window frame towards the upper edge of the painting. In the foreground is an assortment of plastic buckets, used to catch rainwater that fell through the leaky roof. Wires, cans, piles of paper and a VHS tape litter the floor. In the artist's words, the house was "pretty rundown by the time the fire happened."i
“As a 16 year old, in the months before the fire, I was beginning to make drawings and photographs of the interior of the house. That work did not survive the fire. In some ways I feel like I am returning to and resolving that original project that was cut short.”
—Brandi Twilley
Emily Colucci notes that in additon to being emotional documentations of the artist's traumatic upbringing, the works also function as reminders of the fallibility of human memory.ii The hazy atmosphere created by Twilley's gestural brushstrokes and murky color palette soften the descriptive details of objects and parts of the room. In the present lot, items and areas towards the vertical edges of the painting lose their definition, becoming mnemonic echoes of the room Twilley grew up in.
i Brandi Twilley, quoted in Emily Colucci, "Burning Down the House: An Interview with Brandi Twilley," Art F City, August 10, 2016, online.
ii Ibid.
Provenance
Sargent's Daughters, New York Private Collection Acquired from the above by the present owner
Exhibited
New York, Sargent's Daughters, The Living Room, July 26–August 26, 2016
Literature
John Yau, "Indelible Stains," Hyperallergic, July 31, 2016, online (illustrated) Diana Shi, "Artist Paints the Fire That Destroyed Her Childhood Home," Vice, August 20, 2017, online
signed, titled and dated "Brandi Twilley 2016 Smoke and Rain Buckets" on the reverse; inscribed and dated "February 2016 wall with smoke" on the stretcher oil on canvas 32 x 56 in. (81.3 x 142.2 cm) Painted in 2016.