December 5, 2019 - January 25, 2020
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A body as big as this room
Madeleine Cichy

Opening Reception: Thursday, December 5th from 6-9pm
Gallery Hours: Saturdays, 12 – 4PM & by appointment 

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Specialist presents A body as big as this room by Madeleine Cichy, an exhibition of watercolor and acrylic works on paper. Informed by her background in sculpture, these beaded curtain drawings find a new way of approaching responsive environments and bodily presence.

“...we only gain access to ourselves from the outside... I have to be in exteriority in order to touch myself. 
... the body is always outside, on the outside.” 1

My edge meets the beads, which I can feel.
Me feeling me, in a hanging responsive field.
And it’s a twinkling debut, like your birthday in an instant!
Or a quick how-do-you-do without a handshake.
A brief passage, made fun and candy colored.

“Makes rooms lively and cheerful” 2

Maybe the only way to know you’re really there.
A celebratory attestation of me.
Proof of a warm body disrupting space.
And a corroborative clinking after you’ve left.

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1 Nancy, Jean Luc. On the Soul . New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. p.128-129
2 “History of Beaded curtains”. Wikidot, 21 Nov. 2019, http://beadedcurtains.wikidot.com/.

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Madeleine Cichy was born in San Francisco, CA in 1987 and lives and works in Seattle, WA. She received her BA in Studio Art and Economics from Vassar College, and her MFA from Cornell University. She has been awarded the John Hartell Graduate Art Award, the Weitzel Barber Art Travel Prize, and an Edward Albee Foundation residency. Cichy's work has been exhibited in San Francisco, Philadelphia, New York, and Paris. In 2018, her work was featured in “10 Years: 100 Sculptures” at anonymous gallery in Mexico City. She is a co-director at Specialist Gallery, and occasionally an adjunct art instructor at Bellevue College.