Chapter NY is thrilled to present Call NOW, an exhibition of new work by Mira Dancy. This will be the artist’s second show at the gallery and will take place across two locations at Chapter NY and Chapter NY at 83 Pitt Street, NY.  

Dancy’s practice engages the historical trope of woman-as-subject in painting, seeking to recalibrate expectations of how a body can or cannot behave within a narrative and symbolic construct. Rather than repress her image, this fraught sense of autonomy is explored across various media, architecture and atmosphere.

Surfaced as radical muse, She reaches beyond the frame, becoming the catalyst underlying the artist’s layered approach.  Split between defiant self and lingering shadow, this figure’s essence permeates Dancy’s declarative visual campaign, “Herfume” – a demand for outrage and respect, consent in the face of danger. Whether colloquial queen, distant mother or other, Dancy’s materialized matriarch encompasses the many facets of performed and projected womanhood.

For the installation at Chapter NY, Dancy articulates the dimensionality of this female protagonist by affirming her physical presence.  In the gallery space, Herfume // Her Truth stands nearly floor to ceiling, foregrounding woman as architectural impasse.  Both familiar and imposing, this figure asserts her actuality, infusing the architecture with the aura of being present.  Her energy echoes throughout the space, actualized through color or registered in the positive weight of shadows or silhouettes. With almost theatrical clarity, one registers the veracity of this figure’s existence in direct view of her alternate, splintering doubles.

At 83 Pitt Street, Dancy takes cues from the storefront location and adds the texture of public language and the nuanced glow of neon to the mix. The stretched horizontal, Her Sex // Her Say, reads as a type of street-level billboard, while the suspended neon echo commercial (psychic) signage.  The WOMAN becomes simultaneous symbol, essence and spook: split between the everyday and the eternal feminine – a communal Madonna, a private goddess.

Across both locations, language crops up like subliminal speculations. Part poetic intervention, part subtle violence, words divide and materialize among figures as both questioning and divisive—

FREE /
Her Split /
YES /
NOW
ASK ME

Press release