Artist Tiffany Lawson documents a year in the life in new exhibition

At Streetlight Guild in early December, as artists filtered in to drop off work for a silent auction, Tiffany Lawson would occasionally stop and quiz them on the roots of a painting, asking each artist how they began the work and then listening with a student’s ear as they drifted back in time to the moment the brush first touched canvas.

“I think as artists sometimes we get fixated on a theme,” Lawson said at Wild Goose Creative in early January, asked what inspired her line of inquiry a month earlier. “I think it’s easier to … let it flow freely and not be so rigid that you don’t allow yourself to play, or to not let your imagination come into the process.”

For Lawson’s new exhibition, which opens at Wild Goose in Franklinton today (Friday, Jan. 10), the artist uncovered this sense of freedom by setting up a handful of guidelines, crafting the 50 pieces on display on the same mystical blue-toned paper and limiting the time she could work on each to a single day, meaning that when she stepped away to go to bed, she couldn’t touch the painting again when she returned in the morning. 

“And those limits were to gain freedom, if that makes sense,” said Lawson, who created the images over the course of the last year in residency at the East Side art space Streetlight Guild, framing each piece at the end of the day as a means of both punctuating the work and helping her to resist the urge to revisit it on subsequent days. “I think this is the same with all artists, where you second guess your work every single second. You regret what you did. You regret what you didn’t do. And this was a way to free myself from that cycle.”

Naturally, and often without Lawson’s awareness, themes began to develop within the body of work, reflecting both the poems and books the artist read over the last year – particularly novels by the author Toni Morrison – but also the happenings in and around Streetlight Guild, which emerged as a natural bookend to the exhibition. (The first and last paintings displayed at Wild Goose center on a red door the same shade as the one that serves as the gateway to Streetlight.) A handful of the images also relate directly to happenings within the space, including a painting of a standup bass, which Lawson created around the time musician Phil Maneri aired a taped performance of “The Alsatian Queen,” and a colorful grouping of collaged figures born of “Rhapsody & Refrain,” a two-week, 30-poet spoken word blitz, both of which were hosted by Streetlight.

“The time that I spend there, the events that happen there, I mean, I’ve absorbed a lot of it, and of course it would impact my work,” said Lawson, who has displayed the 50 paintings in a series of related groupings, with one wall featuring city scenes, another abstract works, and a third more interior worlds. “I guess a lot of this could be viewed as documentation of all of these things I’ve experienced over the last year.”

Though Lawson generally cocooned herself away on the third floor of Streetlight, the exterior world found ways to bleed into the collection. One piece, for example, features a series of watermelons, which the artist linked with the ongoing call for a free Palestine. Other works reflect afro-futurist themes and ideas culled from Morrison novels, including repeated images of flowers, which Lawson traced directly back to the author.

“[Morrison] does this thing when she’s building the characters for you where there’s a whole lot of flora, and she uses flowers to give you a better understanding of the setting, or a character’s mood,” said Lawson, who began to write down the various flowers she encountered while reading five Morrison novels (Paradise, Jazz, Sula, Tar Baby and Song of Solomon), later researching the varietals online as a means of gaining deeper insight into the writer’s intent. “Knowing where the flowers come from, where they’re cultivated, it makes the stories even bigger and gives you more insight into the characters and their mindsets.”

In the past, Lawson has created collaged, three-dimensional works where the images quite literally leap off of the wall, becoming richly detailed worlds with pockets, corners and crevices in which a viewer can visually drift. And for this series, the artist challenged herself to create a similar sense of depth on the two-dimensional page. One collaged image of a bedroom, for instance, practically invites the viewer to step inside and kick off their shoes, nestling up in the bed with the comforter wrapped around their body. 

In the process, Lawson learned to embrace imperfection, pointing to one painting in which a lamp is presented just slightly askew, which lends a different, necessary sense of movement to the entire piece. “And once I realized that I went for no straight lines,” she said, pointing to the colorful, slightly warped, hand-lined wallpaper gracing the backdrop of one piece and the bending arcs of sunlight streaming down in another. “Even on this vase here, the tilt gives it a little bit different energy.”

Most importantly, however, Lawson said she emerged from the last year with a better sense of her overall artistic voice and how she intends to apply it moving forward. 

“And this might sound lofty, but I definitely want to change something,” she said. “I want to change the world. I want to speak to things in a way where people aren’t at first aware of what we’re talking about, so it can open up into a broader conversation. … I realized with this series I want my art to do more than hang on a wall. And I needed to have that moment, that realization. It was necessary. And it happened at the right time.”