Juxtapoz Magazine – Anne Buckwalter: I Will Clean the Closet, I Will Climb the Stairs

Rebecca Camacho Presents is pleased to announce I Will Clean the Closet, I Will Climb the Stairs, an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Anne Buckwalter. Buckwalter’s show inaugurates the gallery’s new home at 526 Washington Street and fills the main exhibition space and the new Project Room.

Demonstrating an expansion of her distinctive aesthetic and critical vantage point, Buckwalter’s recent work is a deeper examination into the complexities of our interpersonal relationships. Buckwalter asks how partnerships function when the initial excitement associated with the earliest phases of a relationship – introduction, wooing, and experimentation – solidify into everyday partnerships and daily routines that include the division of domestic chores as well as the titillation of carnal desire.

Exploring gender, sexuality, and queerness, I Will Clean the Closet, I Will Climb the Stairs is a continuation of Buckwalter’s investigation of the intimacy, and liminalities found in domestic spaces. The exhibition debuts her largest paintings to date in a series that features homes layered with cross-sections of multi-faceted interiors. Each carefully rendered room provides clues and evidence of its varied inhabitants, suggesting how they move between and occupy different rooms within the same space and the traces these movements leave behind. Newly introduced staircases and closets are metaphors for transitional moments in which to traverse or hide, mirroring the transitional, the in-between, and the parts of ourselves that we choose to conceal. Buckwalter’s rooms are stacked alongside one another in a staccato-like rhythm of flattened planes occupying the picture’s surface. These compressed transitions between rooms as well as the decorative objects that occupy these spaces nod to Buckwalter’s biography and the Pennsylvania Dutch culture and traditions – quilting, furnishings, and decorative motifs – that inform her artistic practice.

The spare imagery of Buckwalter’s works on paper installed in the Project Room are a stark contrast to the visual cacophony of the paintings on view in the main gallery. Highlighting individual objects one might encounter in Buckwalter’s paintings, these works offer the viewer an opportunity to consider the singular items with which the artist imbues particular meaning.

The exhibition also marks the publication of Laundry Room, Buckwalter’s first book of poetry (published by Rebecca Camacho Presents). Laundry Room is inspired by the memories that individual articles of clothing engender, and each composition holds personal significance for the artist.