Chelsie Sunde is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Her work centers on the themes of friendship and matriarchy. She holds a BA in Art from Gonzaga University and an MFA from Brooklyn College. Her work has been shown at Powerhouse Arts and Revelation Gallery in New York City, and the Gonzaga University Art Space in Spokane, WA. She is a recipient of the Brooklyn College Wolfe-Ravenal grant to study women artists’ work in Mexico City.
The subjects include herself, family members, and friends. She chooses effulgent colors from intimate memories and paints with them to convey mood. Crafts like crochet and quilting, passed down to her by her grandmothers, are referenced in grid-like patterning within her paintings. A more colorful rethinking of Agnes Martin’s theories on the grid’s inherent sublimity, these patterns demarcate a space for meditation, but also reference personally remembered objects loaded with emotion, like the checkered tablecloth at her grandmother’s house.
The most transcendent things are often hidden within overlooked togetherness: the simple meal, the passing conversation. Withheld visual information in Sunde’s paintings alludes to her memory gaps and slippages. She’s fixated on the way we can forget all of a face except its expression, all of a place save a singular color of light, even when those places and people once meant everything to us. She paints from these images, alluding to the spiritual significance of quotidian moments, with consideration to what holds these memories within her: why she recalls some but not others.
To contact her about purchasing prints, photography and artwork projects, please click on the ‘Contact’ link.