Exposures: Jamie Earnest: Private Spaces / Public Personas

The 2016 season of Exposures launches with the work of Jamie Earnest, senior BFA student at Carnegie Mellon University. Earnest’s installation Private Spaces/Public Personas coincides with the temporary exhibition Michael Chow aka Zhou Yinghua: Voice For My Father, Michael Chow’s first solo exhibition in the U.S., and it is on view in The Warhol Store’s street-facing windows.

For this series Earnest creates three new large-scale paintings that incorporate details from the private, residential spaces of both Andy Warhol and Chow. Mined from the Sotheby’s catalogues of Warhol’s estate sale, Earnest incorporates objects and other interior details from Warhol’s private townhouse. Famous for his collection of cookie jars, Warhol was also an avid collector of American decorative art and paintings from his contemporaries like Basquiat and Lichtenstein. Bringing these objects in dialogue with details from Chow’s home in Los Angeles, sourced from press articles online, Earnest’s paintings present abstracted views of the private dwellings of these two famous personas. In her painting practice Earnest uses unconventional materials such as aluminum tape, carpet fuzz, insulation, drywall tape, cement, contact paper, latex gloves, and joint compound, and she seeks to explore how abstract spaces such as “home” can be defined through the complex relationship between objects and memory.

Earnest is the recipient of the prestigious Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship. Through this fellowship she attended the Yale Norfolk Summer School of Art in summer 2015. Earnest has participated in several group exhibitions including Great Waves II at Revision Space and Future Tenant in Pittsburgh. She has also had the opportunity to show her work in Alabama and New York. Earnest currently lives and works in Pittsburgh.

Exposures is curated by Jessica Beck, associate curator of art.