Amie Cunat is a Brooklyn-based artist who creates inviting work with a deceptively dark twist. Next month, the artist will unveil eight new paintings in a solo exhibition at New York’s Dinner Gallery, entitled, “Petal Signals.”
As her second solo exhibition with the gallery, formerly known as VICTORI + MO, the work on display is ambiguous in its thematic scope — a departure from the singular message of her last “Meetinghouse” exhibition. The works on display in “Petals Signals” seem recognizable at first glance, almost inviting in their color and floral motifs. Yet, upon further inspection, the work unfolds unsettling forms that take visual cues from her influences across horror and science-fiction movies, Japanese yukata (kimonos), art deco architecture to Shaker drawings and old colonial sketches of trees and plants.
Cunat challenges the viewer with the question: “Can we know something that we’ve never seen before?” It is a simple, yet powerful premise made all the more pressing in our image-based age filled with fervent over-stimulation.
The title of the show was inspired by a trip Cunat took with her husband and daughter to a farm in New York. The artist noticed how all the sunflowers were oddly pointed in the same direction as if pulled by some gravitational force or “bowing toward some deity or in a gesture of collective, melancholic duress,” she told It’s Nice That. As Cunat meditated on the occurrence, she began to explore the signals emitted from all “non-sentient lifeforms” and how they are “limited to “a viewer’s preoccupation with what is familiar,” the artist added.
The resulting work is colorful and charming, yet undeniably brooding and aggressive in several paintings, such as Blood Orange and Rampion Arms.
Amie Cunat’s “Petal Signals” will view from September 8 to October 23 at New York’s Dinner Gallery.
Elsewhere in art, learn the life of Dr. Jane Goodall in this multimedia experience at the Natural History Museum of LA County.
Dinner Gallery
242 W 22nd St,
New York, NY 10011
