SEPTEMBER 14 – NOVEMBER 2, 2022

Closing Reception with the Artist
Wednesday, November 2, 6 – 8 PM

SOCO Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Inside Out, Outside In, a solo exhibition by artist Summer Wheat. The gallery will host a public closing reception with the artist on November 2nd from 6 - 8 PM. This will be the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. 

Inside Out, Outside In features one large painting, three pigment on wood works, and three mosaic stones. Her large painting, Blue Puddles (right) is the partner painting to the work, Blue Puddles (left), featured in Gilded: Contemporary Artists Explore Value and Worth at the Weatherspoon Art Museum at UNC Greensboro which runs from September 10, 2022 - April 8, 2023.

Summer Wheat is known for her vibrant paintings, multifaceted sculptures, and immersive installations that weave together the history of materiality, figuration, and abstraction in both fine art and craft milieus. Each series engages individual and collective human experiences drawn from historical and contemporary sources, mediated through a variety of references ranging from ancient art and medieval tapestries, to etchings from the Renaissance, to modernist abstractions. Wheat’s work examines various manifestations of labor, leisure, commerce, and class through the depiction of numerous figures and archetypes such as farmers, hunters, beekeepers, gardeners, weavers, bankers, and movie stars. The artist’s densely populated “scapes” envision worlds where time seems to have collapsed and every person, regardless of social status, occupies a shared/ equal space, in which both labor and leisure are paths to healing humanity. Using a tongue-in-cheek type of humor inspired by comic strips, Wheat subverts conventional hierarchical structures and stereotypes to create more expansive depictions of daily life throughout history.

For the past year, Wheat has focused on a series of mirrored reflection pieces. COVID provided a unique moment for the artist, and the world, to reflect and to look at ourselves differently - both culturally and personally. Female figures gaze across puddles, the paintings' own reflecting device, reaching out, barely touching. They seem to be engaged in conversation, looking deeply at and inside each other. Creatures – snakes, bees, camels – gaze at each other across a black expanse, hooves and tongues hovering but not connecting. The gilded golden flowers seem to rain from above. 

A signature aspect of Wheat’s work is her expressive use of color and unique method of building a painting, which integrates various tools, from her fingers, to syringes and plastic scrapers, to cake decorating paraphernalia. Using vibrant, almost fluorescent colors of acrylic paint, she combines multiple physical techniques—pushing paint through wire mesh, painting directly onto a heavily impastoed surface, or applying select embellishments— that require her to move around her canvas, working both vertically and horizontally, on the front and the back of each piece. Wheat’s methods and engagement with the emotive nature of color embrace intuition and felt experience over conventional reason and logic, destabilizing the boundaries between figure and ground, representation and abstraction, portrait and landscape, and fine art and craft. The result is tactile, vivid work that engages process, form, and narrative equally, creating layered, non-linear compositions that offer alternative versions of history, mythology, and folklore.

Summer Wheat (Origin, B. 1977)

Summer Wheat (b. 1977, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma) received a B.A. from the University of Central Oklahoma and an M.F.A. from Savannah College of Art and Design. Solo exhibitions of her work have been organized at the Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC (2021); Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO (2020); KMAC Museum, Louisville, KY (2019); Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, CA (2018); Smack Mellon, New York, NY (2018); Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, WA (2017); and Oklahoma Contemporary, Oklahoma City, OK (2016). Select group exhibitions featuring her work include,Yaro Pickers, Harper’s Books, New York, NY (2020); Summer Wheat and Hirosuke Yabe, Wasserman Projects, Detroit, MI (2019); America Will Be! Surveying the Contemporary Landscape, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX (2019); The Magnetic Fields, Gio Marconi, Milan, Italy (2019); SEED, Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, NY (2018); More Material, Salon 94, New York, NY (2014); Expanding the Field of Abstraction, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2013-14); beyond the stretcher, deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA (2013); and Paradox Maintenance Technicians: A comprehensive technical manual to contemporary painting from Los Angeles and Beyond, Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA (2013). Wheat’s work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; Peréz Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL; The Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA; The Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC; and the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, KY. Wheat has received several awards and prizes including, the Northern Trust Purchase Prize at EXPO Chicago (2019) and the New York NADA Artadia Award (2016).