Exhibitions

BRIDGET BAILEY: IMAGINARY FRIEND OF OLD

Neue Welt / 223 4th Ave N. July 12 - August 16th (Reception: July 12 6:00pm - 9:00pm)

Bridget Bailey

Imaginary Friend of Old refers to Winky Bop, my imaginary friend of old–a squirrel–but is also an ode to socks, The Indigo Girls, grandmother love, reflections in a punch bowl, what a good song or poem sounds and feels like, my own paintings of old, of now, and of the future, and my love for and hope in all these things. I think of my paintings as love paintings, much in the same way one could think of all poems as love poems, all songs as love songs, bittersweet and slightly yellowed, nostalgic and new but true, often blue. They are meditations on moderation, opulence, poetry, lesbians, music, reuse, Winky Bop, art I love, people I love, things/materials I love, and concepts/theories even, such as "Queer Phenomenology", "Fictioning," and meanings of the color blue. I think of my paintings as plastic spaces in which soft collisions of all of these things are possible, through play: it is the world of my imaginary friends/paintings of the past, present, and future. It is a figurative but material space, in which Mary Oliver can feed Winky Bop sunflower seeds out of her hand, and I can be beside them, watching, wearing my Le Tigre shirt and my backpack, in socked feet, and holding my wife’s hand, and focusing in, because this is serious !!!

Bridget Bailey (she/her) is an artist living and working in Nashville. She received her BA from the University of Virginia and her MFA in Painting from Boston University. Her work is rooted in painting, poetry, and play: this manifests in material exploration, use of text in paintings, and a notion of world building and the diaristic--the personal is poetic-- that pervades the work. She works at Episcopal School of Nashville, assistant teaching second grade.