| Soft Logic represents my curatorial debut. As an artist and writer, putting together curatorial projects seemed like the logical next step. I seized the opportunity to employ a small project room at Broadway Gallery NYC as the site for a project I had been playing around with for a while. My idea was simple: I wanted to focus on small-scale abstract paintings by emerging female artists. Though my thematic aim was not overtly feminist or essentialist in terms of “female painting,” I saw this choice as a kind of affirmative action in an art scene that tends to be so overwhelmingly male. I wanted the work I selected to be dissonant, yet still formally and conceptually related to other pieces in the show. | 
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Gillian Sneed is the curator of Soft Logic on view at Broadway Gallery NYC in May.
Sarah Duke, Untitled, 2007. Oil on Panel, 16 x 16 inches. Courtesy of the artist.Soft Logic represents my curatorial debut. As an artist and writer, putting together curatorial projects seemed like the logical next step. I seized the opportunity to employ a small project room at Broadway Gallery NYC as the site for a project I had been playing around with for a while. My idea was simple: I wanted to focus on small-scale abstract paintings by emerging female artists. Though my thematic aim was not overtly feminist or essentialist in terms of “female painting,” I saw this choice as a kind of affirmative action in an art scene that tends to be so overwhelmingly male. I wanted the work I selected to be dissonant, yet still formally and conceptually related to other pieces in the show. I chose three of my favorite emerging abstract painters, Kimberly Brickley, Sarah Duke, and Yui Kugimiya, the first a current MFA student, the other two recent MFA graduates. In trying to discern what it was about these works that attracted me, I realized it was an affinity for bright color, an interest in challenging the notion of the grid, and an exploration of amorphous forms that resonated with me. I realized that these are some of the same themes present in my own work, and after a serious internal debate about the problematic nature of including one’s own work in a show she curates, I decided to include my own work, since it made visual sense.
Though each artist is unique in her style and approach, we shared a vision that finds expression through a formal idiom that investigates the relationship between structure and organicism. For instance, Brickley’s multimedia abstractions explore the notion of landscape. Influenced by topographical maps, she is interested in nature, decay, and biological phenomena. Similarly, Duke’s delicately rendered oils depict vibrant and enigmatic amorphous forms that are the result of observation of disparate objects being forced together. Her paintings represent her attempt to reconcile the contours of these shapes. Kugimiya uses non-traditional materials such as yarn, in conjunction with oil paint, in an evocation and simultaneous destruction of the grid. Similarly, my own acrylic-on-paper works explore the transmutation of the grid from something rectilinear to something inexact.
These works worked, in concert, to indicate exciting new directions in painting in terms of their materiality, and approach to color and media. Softening the hard edges of formalism, they represent approaches that are playful and instinctive.
