Lisha Bai
After Hours
February 24 - April 1, 2023

Deanna Evans Projects is pleased to present After Hours, an exhibition by Lisha Bai, opening February 24, 2023. This is Bai’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. 

Bai is presenting a new body of work in After Hours, one that features textiles, specifically piecework fabric curtains. Bai has long been interested in the interplay between illusionism and materiality in the history of modernism—in objects that simultaneously invite viewers to perceive a continuing, believable world and self-consciously point to the physical stuff of their making. For After Hours, Bai pieces together influences and images from many brightly-colored textiles, cutting and sewing them together to resemble light streaming through a window at the close of day, the time when her three kids are in bed and her studio practice typically begins. These works are intended to be functional curtains—doing the job of filtering light, concealing and revealing what lies beyond them while allowing the viewer to peer into a pictorial space.

The imagery is an homage to painters who work deftly with light and color—like Joseph Albers, Lois Dodd, and George Bireline—and also draws from her own experience as a Korean American growing up in Alabama. Pieces featured in the exhibition speak directly to her deep interest in bojagi, an ancient Korean tradition of wrapping cloths constructed from a variety of different fabrics, as well as from quiltmakers from Gee’s Bend, Alabama, like Annie Mae Young and Mary Lee Bendolph, whose compositions defy their materiality. 

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Lisha Bai lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been exhibited at DC Moore, Halsey McKay, Klaus von Nichtssagend, Fortnight Institute, and National Academy of Art, among other venues. She holds a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis and an MFA from Yale School of Art.

Press:
Sight Unseen
Artforum