Grimm Gallery | When We Said Break a Leg, We Meant It
An interview with artist Daisy May Sheff (BA Art, 2018)
Daisy May Sheff (b. 1996) received a BA from the UCLA Department of Art in 2018, where she studied with Silke Otto-Knapp, Lari Pittman, Barbara Kruger, Ruby Neri, and Benjamin Weissman, among others. Her work has been included in a number of group exhibitions since 2014.
Daisy May Sheff, Hearer who Hears Sounds, 2021. Oil on linen, 17 × 21 in. Theater is all around us—performance seemingly intersecting with existence. The stage? Our phones. Our social interactions. Our governing bodies. You see, our relationship to performance is in chronic flux, and for younger generations, the stage is ever the more multitudinous. In new group exhibition, Someone said that the world’s a stage—now showing at GRIMM Gallery’s New York City arm—curator Margot Samel brings together sixteen artists to engage with the world of theater, or perhaps the world as theater. Featuring more established figures like Dirk Braeckman, Christina Forrer, and Cindy Sherman, the curation is peppered with newer voices in the space—Louise Giovanelli, B. Ingrid Olson, and Daisy May Sheff, for example—all of whom are featured here and whose selected work explores painting’s theatricality. Read below as we excavate the minds of these unique individuals, and welcome their presence on our editorial stage...
California-based artist Daisy May Sheff recently made her solo debut with A Mountain Girl With Skyblue Teeth at White Columns, the name of which was adapted from the lyrics of Marc Bolan’s “Cat Black (The Wizard’s Hat)”. The artist, born in 1996, received her BA from UCLA in 2018 after studying under names like Lari Pittman, Barbara Kruger, Ruby Neri, and more. There, she honed her craft, creating surreal fairy tales on canvas. Through an improvisational process where she adds, takes away, and layers her paintings, the works as a whole represent a narrative of that abstraction process.
Sheff’s own stage production, so to speak, sees her works Forest Sleep, She Shall Hear When She Has Listened, and others put on their own performance. The works could be said to question the tension between scripted and candid, backlit or veiled. Here, the artist fields a few questions from her studio.
How have your experiences influenced your art?
I’ve spent most of my life in Northern California in the country... a lot of time watching movies, making movies, reading, pretending. I think my work has a sense of nostalgia—romanticizing of old forgotten things. Also I am obsessed with animals, especially dogs.
Can you describe your creative process?
I work on many pieces at once—going from one to the other. I’ll have a color or an image to start with and go from there.
What is your intent with playing with heaviness, lightness, foreground, and background on a canvas?
When I’m painting I allow for a suspension of logic—a permission to fragment all these elements. Scenes transform into each other—the location of the paintings is always in flux. I make absurd, nonsensical links between images—a descending fish could be a pattern on a sleeve or migrating in a rocky stream.
How do your pieces continue the conversation of theatrical imagery in art?
I think there is a feeling of staged drama in a lot of my paintings—about to do an action... doing something obscure yet purposeful—sneaking, spying, writing (exaggeratedly large upside-down letters). There is a sense of characters performing a larger narrative in a created, maybe artificial world. I love things that are camp and handmade, and also costume and stage design.
As a young artist, what is a misconception about artists in your peer set that you would like to debunk?
This is all so new for me so I don’t feel like I’m in any position to debunk anything or speak for young artists!
— Nate Rynaski, Aug. 16, 2021
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Flaunt website.
HEADER IMAGE: Daisy May Sheff, Forest Sleep (2021). Oil on linen, 24” X 36”. Courtest of the artist and Grimm, Amsterdam | New York.
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