Stacy Lynn Waddell

CANDICE MADEY is thrilled to announce the gallery’s second solo exhibition with Stacy Lynn Waddell, light takes time to reach us, presenting a series of landscapes composed of layers of precious metals; a suite of Audubon bird specimens, rendered in low-relief pastiglia and silver-leafed; and a single gilded portrait. Winslow Homer’s watercolor After the Hurricane, Bahamas, in which a lone figure appears washed ashore on a beach, is an important touchstone for the new body of work.

Waddell frequently sources imagery from 19th century American art and cites a particular fascination with the period’s spirit of unbridled optimism, rapid technological progress, and belief in manifest destiny, often represented by idealized landscapes. Painted in 1899, After the Hurricane, Bahamas characterizes Homer’s interest in the unpredictable weather conditions that he experienced while traveling in the tropics. Through a contemporary lens, the work seems to foreshadow the relationship with between extreme weather patterns, climate change, the dizzying effect of accelerated global exchange. Waddell echoes Homer’s setting in her own work, exploring how the origins of present-day environmental issues are deeply rooted in 19th century European and American policy and the Industrial Revolution.

Waddell further explore the complicated relationship between nature, economics, and hierarchical concepts of natural resources in a suite of silver leaf works that portray images from John James Audubon’s Birds of America. Specifically, Waddell interprets a hummingbird that was described in the book as “nondescript and difficult to determine,” suggesting its relative lack of consequence in comparison to showier specimens. While taxonomy was popular practice in 19th century natural sciences, Waddell probes how the practice of classification has propagated value systems that extend beyond the scientific into the social, ranking one group over another.

A single painting on canvas is based on a 1964 photograph by Malian artist Malick Sidibé, in which a man with his arms overhead dances the merengue, an Afro-Caribbean dance that originated in the Dominican Republic in the 19th century. In her work, Waddell frequently revisits the vibrant period of Malian history when an emboldened population was reinventing a new national identity (after more than 60 years of French colonial rule), proposing a vivid counterpoint to forms of patriotism in American history.

Whether working on paper or on canvas, Waddell uses wide array of processes to create lush texture, including gilding, embossing, and other unexpected approaches. The result is a temporal experience that requires movement and time to fully see her subject matter. She is candid about the seductive effect of reflective surfaces, further acknowledging that her use of gold, silver, and other precious metals alludes to entrenched, cultural notions of value and currency.

The title of the show, light takes time to reach us, is also the title of the artist’s first work in neon, offering a universal and transcendent alternative to nationalistic notions of history and identity.

Stacy Lynn Waddell’s solo exhibitions include Home House, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA; Mettle, CANDICE MADEY, New York, NY; Epitaph for A Darling Lady, Visual Arts Center of Richmond, Richmond, VA; and The Evidence of Things Unseen, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC, and others. Recent group exhibitions include Spirit in the Land, The Nasher Museum of Art (curated by Trevor Schoonmaker); Get Lifted! The Art of the Ecstatic, KARMA, New York, NY (curated by Hilton Als); Taking Space: Contemporary Women Artists and the Politics of Scale, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA and The Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ; Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY. Her work is in the collections of The Bristol Museum of Art and Gallery, The Brooklyn Museum, The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, The Gibbes Museum of Art, The Mint Museum, The Nasher Museum of Art, The North Carolina Museum of Art, The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, The Princeton University Art Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and The Weatherspoon Art Museum, among numerous other museums and private collections. Stacy was a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellow in Umbria, Italy in 2021, and in 2017, she was an Artist-in-Residence at Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans. She was a 2010 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation grant.

Stacy lives and works in North Carolina. She has an MFA from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

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