Reynolds Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Milk Tide, a two-person exhibition, with works by Christy Matson & Amanda Valdez. The exhibition opens on Friday, March 21, 2025 at our Main Street location with a public reception from 5 – 7 pm. The show runs through May 23.
For this dual show, Matson and Valdez present Milk Tide, an exhibition of mixed media paintings that explore the history and memories the body holds and their deep connection to the land they grew up on. While the works do not depict direct references to specific landmarks, the iconography of landscapes becomes evident through the layering and rounding of shapes within the work. The artists’ unique interpretations of the world emulate the softness of memories and their evolution as the mind attempts to preserve them. Both artists deviate from traditional painting methods, creating eye catching texture and patterns through the use of weaving and textiles. Their methods and intentions come together seamlessly to bring this show to life.
An essay by Shannon R. Stratton, Chicago, IL
‘Do you ever experience, startled, the feeling of familiarity in places you have actually never been before, but realize slowly it is because the slope of the ground and the smell of the air resemble your mother-land? There is a character that is the same, and as it gains focus, you begin to see how the color of this dirt reminds you of home and so you find yourself for a moment held by the landscape that is tethering your inside to what is out.’
‘Christy Matson and Amanda Valdez both live with the Pacific Northwest inside them; their motherlands. Exhibiting together for Milk Tide, their woven and mixed media pictures of rounded mounds and slopes and arches, provide both the landscape (Matson) and portrait (Valdez) orientation of landscapes by feel. There are no referential images that one can point to and say: “Mt. Rainier!,” rather one gets the impression of place and how it becomes re-rendered in the imagination over time. The act of remembering always brings forth and changes the recollection before being stored back in the catalog of memories, melting them down over time into wisps and veils that become less and less like pictures. Matson and Valdez show us the sensation of those memories; something only art is capable of.’
‘Matson and Valdez’s Milk Tide gathers us into the shapes and color and weather and light that live inside of us, often living on as navigational tools. I find my way home via the black granite stark cold and bright peak that stays on inside of my heart. That sharp shape means “mountain,” the idea of a mountain that is the idea of home; and always the idea of me.’
About the Artists
Christy Matson
Based in Los Angeles, California, Christy Matson merges the precision of handweaving with the expressive qualities of painting through a manually operated Jacquard loom. Her work, often referencing landscape, balances structure and fluidity, capturing a sense of place through woven form. Matson’s process begins with oil pastel drawings, watercolors, and other works on paper, which she translates into weave structures using a distinctive digital approach. As the loom follows her instructions, she improvises with the weft (horizontal rows) with ingenuity and nuance, introducing subtle shifts in color, structure and texture. The result challenges conventional notions of both art objects and the act of making itself. Matson received her BFA from the University of Washington and her MFA from California College of the Arts. She has since had solo exhibitions at the Milwaukee Art Museum, The Cranbrook Art Museum and the Long Beach Art Museum. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Knoxville Museum of Art, The Asheville Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art’s Renwick Gallery. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Cranbrook Art Museum, The Mint Museum and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art’s Renwick Gallery.
Amanda Valdez
Amanda Valdez is a research-based artist best known for mixed-media paintings which incorporate sewing, embroidery, fabric, oil stick, and other paint materials. Her process begins through sketching compositions, and her stylized forms reference landscape, physical experiences, archaeological objects and sites that she encounters in day-to-day life, research, and travel. Her paintings reflect the history and memory that the body holds in its somatic makeup: scars, sags, wrinkles, marks, symmetries, and asymmetries. She uncovers these through the act of drawing, accessing a deep body of stored shapes, and personal experiences in the process of developing her work. Her recent paintings utilize new techniques and materials from intricately woven threads to textured, layered oil stick which adds to the viscid acrylic drip forms and smooth velvety gouache. Valdez was born in Seattle, Washington in 1982 and lives in New York, New York. She earned an MFA from Hunter College, New York, New York and a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. Her work is held in the public collections of Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, New York, Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts, Davis Museum, Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts, and US Embassy, US Department of State, Guatemala City, Guatemala. Her work has been reviewed in ArtForum, Brooklyn Rail, L.A. Times, Hyperallergic, and Whitewall.
Matson’s artist portrait by Molly Haas.
Valdez’s artist portrait by Willy Somma.
