Rehearsal | Cicely Carew & Sneha Shrestha, a.k.a IMAGINE

An artist’s studio functions as a container for creative endeavors. Artistic gestures are repeated in private until—eventually and hopefully—the artwork is shown to the public. The artwork is generated and tested in the studio and then staged and displayed in an exhibition space. 

This exhibition proposes the gallery as an extension of the studio practices of Cicely Carew and Sneha Shrestha, a.k.a. IMAGINE. A vital element of each artist’s practice involves repeating actions that are simultaneously process and product. Emerging from a period of focused production, the artists will complete the exhibited artworks with and within Abigail Ogilvy Gallery. As the artists flex and bend to respond to the particular conditions of this site, the rehearsal of their work becomes tied to its final performance. 

Cicely Carew grounds her practice in abstract painting—its history and potentialities. She approaches her work through improvisation, beginning any artwork with a material, an idea, a disposition, and/or a reference she then iterates from. Estranged from any initial context and reoriented towards two- or three-dimensional painting, the concepts embedded in the work manifest in unpredicted ways as they ingeminate, building out from, on top of, and around each other. Ultimately an anarchic strategy, Carew’s making sets into motion indeterminate yet affirmative outcomes that are a faithful record of all stages of an artwork: idea, research, play, and result. 

Sneha Shrestha, a.k.a, IMAGINE, uses a unique lexicon grounded in Devanagari, the script of the Nepali language, in public, large-scale murals and on canvas within the studio. Born and raised in Nepal and now based in the United States, IMAGINE’s artwork stylistically excavates this specific alphabet within the artist’s larger project of both celebrating and deeply considering her country, home, family, and culture. IMAGINE works in between, toggling between articulating lettering as an aesthetic metaphor as well as an actual system of communication. How IMAGINE’s brush records movement demands precision; even the slightest change in her breathing pattern can profoundly affect the dynamism of her line work. Each final stroke encapsulates its practice, divulging the complete conditions of its making.  

Together, these artists embrace the repetition of rehearsal and its all-consuming perspective into hazard and happenstance. Rehearsal presents these artists together for the first time.