Touch_em

Press Release

A surprising amount of expansion happens in a single breath. From flared nostrils and pursed lips down to each bristling cilium. We grow and shrink a bunch of times each minute. Taking in invisible space and changing its composition, all the while we try to think of basically anything but this whole process itself. Put your head between your legs and breathe into a paper bag, now you can see it, just past the translucent apparition of your nose, you are the brown paper and the hands pressing it to your lips, you are everything contained within escaping the whole time, only made visible by the bag wrinkling and smoothing failing to contain anything for too long.

Breath and touch are both so ubiquitous and somehow still so intimate. When we share space, we take each other’s breath into ourselves but touching requires a certain amount more intentionality. Shelley Turley's paintings deliver a vision of the interplay between domesticity and inner life in ways that both expand and contract like quick ragged breaths turning to slow controlled exhalations, filling that paper bag with both nothing and everything. Breath that is compulsory to life and touching that is essential to living.

Turley's new show revisits the single-word title of Helen's Costume's first show Touching, but it does so under a context slightly removed from 2020's deprivation, it still carries with it many of the same descriptions and evocations, it’s still couched in some of the same longings, but it’s delivered with something between an edict and advice, these textured visions speak to the many ghosts of ourselves, take a deep breath all the way down into your stomach and remember intentionality, if you're going touch, Touch 'Em With Love.

Chase Algood: I was wondering if you had any feelings about how the domestic factors into your work and how you use the stuff of everyday life to make the stuff of the exciting, painter’s world?

Shelley Turley: What comes to mind for me is one of the big influences of mine is seeing photos of goth kids at the mall at Cinnabon with the gross 20th-century crap that is ubiquitous in your life, but yet these kids are just trying to have this meaningful experience. I don’t know what goths do, but feeling kind of spiritual and dramatic amid Mcdonalds cups. I love that whole melding of everyday shit with trying to bring some magic into your world.

CA: I’m thinking about that connection of the like, Hot Topic teen next to a Hot Dog On a Stick, trying to find something meaningful. It is almost a modern version of the sacred and the profane.

ST: I’m very interested in the appropriation of middle-class white people taking different aspects of ancient spiritual traditions and sort of putting that through a suburban lens and kind of making it really wonky.

CA: The title of the show is taken from a Bobbie Gentry song. When creating a space for yourself, do you listen to music while you’re working?

ST: Yeah, for sure. I feel like music is definitely a part of the energy of the work. When the Allman Brothers come on, there’s something about their music. I want to sort of infuse their spirit into a lot of my paintings. I want to paint this painting like “Melissa” sounds.

CA: Helen’s opened under the context of the pandemic and quarantine, and now this will be the tenth show and now there’s a different context for what the pandemic means. How are things different working now (as opposed to the first days of the pandemic)?

ST: I am still interested in the same themes. I’m trying to push myself to go bigger. Maybe that would be something. During the pandemic, our worlds got very small. I’m doing bigger canvases now maybe just subconsciously, because my world’s opened up again, I can go bigger. There are more people in some of the paintings. People are invited into the canvas as we invite people back into our houses.

CA: I feel like there is a connection to rock and roll or country mythologies with your work. When you build these worlds, and to me, a lot of these paintings could exist in the same universe in my mind, which is probably the universe of your mind, is there anything with storytelling, myth-building, or world-building that keeps you going from painting to painting, that connects the work together or are they kind of just individual expressions?

ST: There are definitely themes that I use over and over like a lot of artists do. There are definitely a lot of images I love using. I love using that 70s guy with a mustache a lot. There’s a painting in the show where there’s like a bearded 70s guy with a 60s flip girl in a nightgown, and they are like a couple. It’s kind of like a self-portrait because I feel like I carry both of these energies. Like the 60s flip-up nightgown gal and this hard-living guy with a mustache, where Brenda Lee and the Allman Brothers intersect. I’m trying to find that sweet spot. I think I carry both these energies.