What Will You Give?

Sidecar is pleased to present What Will You Give?, an exhibition of large-scale paintings by Veronica Fernandez and Tidawhitney Lek, organized in collaboration with Melanie Ouyang Lum. This is the first presentation at Sidecar for both artists. What will you give? Artists and friends Veronica Fernandez and Tidawhitney Lek explore this question on and off canvas. Their paintings abound with generosity, empathy, wonder, delight, and hope. Both women plumb the depths of their experiences to render the ecstasy and agony of the human condition in painterly bids for connection and acts of witness. In densely layered compositions that merge past and present, inherited and embodied memories, self and other, both artists give form to stories of love and loss as personal as they are universal. Employing their distinctive visual languages, the pair index domestic family dramas, childhood memories, and locations integral to their identities and histories. The tenderness, vulnerability, and economic/social hardships animated by their compositions solicit from the viewer what scholar Tina M. Campt might call hapticity, or the “labor of feeling across difference and precarity; the effort of feeling implicated or affected in ways that create restorative intimacy.” In this way, the paintings engender occasions of reciprocity and exchange. For example, Fernandez’s large-scale mixed-media paintings oscillate between obscurity and revelation, with precisely detailed representations unraveling into gestural brushstrokes, washes of color, and uncanny shifts in scope or scale that engage the viewer’s imagination through irresolution. Marshaling texture to disrupt the pictorial plane, Fernandez applies paint straight from the tube or builds dense layers of oil in quasi-bas relief dimensionality. Moments of dissolution and disruption evoke the instability of memory, the impermanence of emotion, and the ambiguity of psychological processing. The irreducible there-ness of Lek’s lucid hyper-realism engenders an illusion so convincing that the viewer is all but confident they could step into the canvas and open the glass door. Lek plays with perspective and scale. She skews her compositions just beyond life-sized. Her trompe l’oeil details and vivid color palettes conjure verisimilitude, while discordant details and conflations of interior and exterior, near and far, lend the compositions a surreality. The vertiginous combination of mundane scenery and uncanny incongruence illuminates that there is more to the story than meets the eye. —Tara Anne Dalbow Tidawhitney Lek (b. 1992, Long Beach, CA) is a Cambodian-American painter. Her work plays with narrative and the everyday experience of a first-generation American born to immigrant parents. Her bright and somber paintings present nuances of domesticity. Figures and hands interact in her compositions as cultural Southeast-Asian elements echo through mundane objects. Lek reinvents the conventional mediums of pastel, acrylic, and oil paints on canvas, interchanging textures as pictorial spaces recede and soften. Lek’s work has been exhibited at Jeffrey Deitch, New York, NY & Los Angeles, CA; the Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA; Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Miami, FL; the Armory Show, New York, NY; and Made in LA 2023 at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, among other galleries and institutions. Her work has been acquired by Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; East West Bank Collection, Pasadena, CA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; K11 Foundation, Hong Kong; ICA Miami, Miami, FL; Perez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA. Veronica Fernandez (b. 1998, Norfolk, VA) draws from memory to illustrate the complexities of domestic life; her paintings explore relationships between people and their environments. Referencing family photographs and art historical works, Fernandez blurs personal recollections into emotive scenes that evoke a shared nostalgia. She reworks the familiar, transforming what is hers into unfamiliar, expansive new realms. Drawing attention to the impermanence of emotions, Fernandez allows her narratives to remain open-ended. As she shares her experience, she raises questions about where we come from, how we are shaped, and how we interact with one another. Fernandez has held solo exhibitions at Galleria Poggiali, Milan, Italy and Sow & Tailor, Los Angeles, CA, among others. She has participated in group shows at JTT, New York, NY; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; Sow & Tailor, Hong Kong; Jenkins Johnson Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York City, NY; and other galleries and institutions. Her work is in the collections of Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; Pond Society, Shanghai, China; and X Museum, Beijing, China. The artist lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

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