Delightedly, the June Kelly Gallery opens its 2023-24 lineup with a mixed-media exhibition titled 2nd movement by Debra Priestly. Recent works mirroring the artist’s decades-long mapping of memory will open at 166 Mercer Street, on Friday, September 8.  The exhibition will remain on view through November 28.

Inspiration for Debra Priestly’s art comes from the materials of everyday life, more often than not those reflective of her personal existence.  Art writer Brittany Webb, Ph.D. writes, “Whether in painting, drawing, sculpture or installation, her work has created opportunities for close looking and thoughtful listening.  2nd movement reflects Priestly’s years spent considering genealogy, preservation, and the mapping of memory in an intentionally restricted color palette and deploying negative space that encourages a measured pace of viewing.

History is a structuring feature of Priestly's practice, and an institutional impulse appears at work behind the scenes in several of the series on view.  She deftly handles the tools of her family history, which include photographs with handwritten notes, teacups, canning jars, carefully collected china.  These objects meant to serve, preserve, or commemorate are repurposed in works from her mattoon series on view here, where the canning jar inspires the shapes of the surfaces that feature drawings of her elder relatives and prints which map areas where her family has lived.  Priestly is an excavator, a narrator, and the registrar of her own family archive, creating new uses for these containers now artfully holding this history on the walls.”

Webb further writes, “Drawings from the somewhere listening series mine twentieth century family photographs, with Priestly’s ancestors drawn on a white background.  The faces of named sitters are seen in graphite and charcoal, extracted from the visual context pictured in the original image (somewhere listening: McCoy and Veora Priestly, 2023 and somewhere listening: Nancy Veora Gray Priestly, 2020-2023) or emphasized with care amongst a group of redacted others (somewhere listening: Noah Hardiman, 2020-2023).  In making these larger works from tiny archival photos, Priestly expands the size and impact of these images and invites viewers to slow down, lean in, and luxuriate with her in quiet stillness.”

Priestly, a native of Springfield, Ohio, lives and works in New York City and Upstate New York.  She holds a BFA from The Ohio State University and an MFA from Pratt Institute. Her work has been shown in many one-person and group exhibitions throughout the United States and abroad.  Priestly is represented in the collections of Columbus Museum of Art, OH, Jundt Art Museum, Spokane, WA, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA, The Albany Institute of History & Art, NY The Ohio State University, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The Atlanta Life Insurance Company, Ariel Capital Management, AT&T, The Sandor Family Collection, the Francis J. Greenburger Collection, The Petrucci Family Foundation, Ashbury, NJ and other private collections.