Hales is delighted to announce LJ Roberts' solo show, Carry You With Me: 10 Years of Portraits, opens on 27 April 2022 at the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, California.
Carry You With Me is the result of a long-term, ongoing project by LJ Roberts, consisting of 26 six-by-four-inch embroidered portraits of the artist's friends, collaborators, and lovers within New York's queer and trans communities. An artist perhaps best known for large-scale, collaged, textile works, Roberts spends up to one year stitching each portrait within the series, taking inspiration from both photographs and memory. As much a tribute to the subjects as they are to the public and private places that provide safe spaces for vital exchange, the images hone in on meticulously stitched details-from the letters that make up Zoe Leonard's critically important I want a president mural along the High Line, to the book covers and refrigerator magnets that distinguish a person's home.
Roberts also regards the backs of each embroidery-abstract networks of colorful threads layered atop one another, created entirely by happenstance-as integral to the works as the front images themselves. The artist considers the series as a way of dismantling the heteronormative tendencies of portraiture, and also of subverting conventional ideas of representation and abstraction by making each dependent on the other.
LJ Roberts
Carry You With Me: 10 Years of Portraits
Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts
328 Lomita Dr
Stanford
CA 94305
United States
27 April - 27 November 2022
For more information please visit the Stanford website here.
