CONNOR MARIE STANKARD Love Apple

Night Gallery is pleased to announce Love Apple, an exhibition of new oil paintings on canvas by Connor Marie Stankard. This is the artist’s first solo presentation with the gallery and follows her participation in the 2022 group exhibition The Heavy Light Show.  

Fruit shrivels off the vine. Death begins its crawl at birth. Every beginning implies an end. We know. And still, between the poles of alive and not, we attempt to slow the passage of time, to mark ourselves as those who were here and knew beauty.

Cycles of decay and desire move in lockstep within the world of Connor Marie Stankard’s Love Apple. The paintings depict pallid fruit, enervated livestock, and scant limbs in ambient states of rot and reproduction. Rendered in shades of black, red, white, and blue, these bruised forms occupy the same sparse, dark room. It’s unclear whether the inhabitants have been there for an afternoon or a century, or if they want out.

Stankard taxonomizes the organisms she creates, collecting matter in her dark tank as an attempt to pause the march of time. Such is a paradox of beauty: to preserve that which is perpetually disintegrating. As the word vanity signifies pride and futility, the paintings operate as a vivarium, able to hold the tragicomedy of both meanings.

Vanitas painting, a still-life tradition in which objects serve as reminders of death, appears throughout Stankard’s practice. But while the historical objective of vanitas was to instill pious humility in viewers, Love Apple does not moralize. It hums with sinister glamor and hysterical pleasure. 

The apple is a rudimentary motif, familiar enough to withstand perversion. Stankard’s are misshapen and hermaphroditic—the artist shows them moldering, teeming with seminal force, and dripping between legs. Some are hatching. Others have died long ago. Platonic and erotic love intertwine ambiguously in the dim space. 

A girl's face looms large and vertical. She stands as both guardian and observer, presiding over Stankard's shadowy biosphere and its visitors. Her pupils are dilated, a phenomenon associated with both prolonged exposure to darkness and a physical reaction to feelings of love.

— Jayne Pugh