Leigh Tarentino
The Night Hours

Mixed Greens is thrilled to present an ambitious, site-specific window installation by Providence-based artist Leigh Tarentino. Known for her works on paper and digital prints, Tarentino translates the constructed landscape to dynamically layered fabric panels in our 26th Street windows.

For the last decade, Tarentino used watercolor and ink to render delicate, and often haunting, representations of our manmade landscape. Signs of technology and suburban sprawl such as power lines, highway signs, bridges, and overpasses became elegant compositions in Tarentino’s drawings, inspiring viewers to rethink roadside elements often considered to be eye sores. Since 2012, she focused her attention on suburbia itself. Graphic paintings of leafless trees wrapped in holiday lights highlight the eerie loneliness of the nocturnal, winter landscape. The materiality of the painted surface and the black and white palette capture the starkness of the moonlight on snow.

For The Night Hours, Tarentino will hang layers of fabric that have been painted, silkscreened, and digitally printed with monochrome images. The various opaque and transparent panels are inspired by her nighttime suburban exploration of landscape, single-family houses, and gardens, illuminated by artificial light. The curtain-like quality of the collaged fabric references both the site-specificity of the piece and the archetype of home. Rippling, slightly distorted, and moving ever so slightly, The Night Hours gives an uncanny perspective on suburban ideas of comfort, security, and privacy. Viewers are invited to peer up at windows within windows whose odd angles disrupt a clear vision of suburban well-being.

Leigh Tarentino received a BFA in Painting from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Rhode Island School of Design. She is an Assistant Professor at Brown University. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at prestigious venues including the Stas Namin Centre, Moscow, Russia; Bank Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; and BRIC Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn, NY. Solo exhibition venues include Black and White Gallery, NYC; Harnett Gallery, University of Rochester, NY; Space Inno, Seoul, Korea; and Adam Gallery, London, England. She was awarded a Pollock-Krasner grant, a Gottlieb Foundation grant, and residencies at the Ragdale Foundation, the Hambidge Center, Anderson Ranch, and Maitland Art and History Museums. In 2014, Tarentino has upcoming solo exhibitions at Christopher Newport University’s Falk Gallery in Virginia and Florida’s Maitland Art and History Museums.

For more information, please visit leightarentino.com


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