On the road: "Take Five" in Buffalo
Installation view Take Five at UB Anderson Gallery: L to R: Adriane Colburn, Melissa Dadourian, and Meghan Brady. Courtesy of the artists / Photo: Jason Andrew
Contributed by Jason Andrew
It seems only fitting that University at Buffalo, an institution built on the reputation of one of the great female art dealers of the 20th century, Martha Jackson, would be the one to raise the bar that much higher when it comes to “women’s work.” “Take Five” featured the work of five women: Meghan Brady, Adriane Colburn, Melissa Dadourian, Tricia Keightley, and Meg Lipke. Curated by Robert Scalise, the mercurial director at the UB Art Galleries, the show was one of the most ambitious and provocative exhibitions I saw in 2019 thanks to his dynamic eye and insightful juxtapositions. So with deadlines erased by the pandemic, I welcomed the opportunity to revisit an event that allowed each artist to take great risks in scale, break boundaries between genres in their processes, and push the notion of material as subject matter in their art.
Over the last few years, Meghan Brady has shifted away from painting on stretched canvas and towards site-specific unstretched works often on Tyvek. I first saw her work in April 2018 atTiger Strikes Asteroid. At the Anderson Gallery, her 16-foot, multi-paneled, blue beauty titled Everyday (2018) was a stunner. With big gestural marks and bold colors, she expands traditional pictorial space pushing painting into the realm of installation. It’s no wonder Brady’s work has been compared to Betty Woodman’s. Brady is brilliant in her ability to render breadth and drama in epic scale while puzzling in representational forms that allude to the human body and objects from the everyday.
