A Romantic Gesture | Galleri Urbane | Dallas, TX | 2018

A Romantic Gesture started with distance. My partner was living in Vermont, I was in Dallas, and we were trying to stitch together something resembling closeness from across a thousand miles and a pile of cat hair. A Romantic Gesture became a way of leaning into that space—not sidestepping the ache of separation, but embracing it. It’s a love letter. Not subtle. Not ironic. Just honest. I wanted to take the idea of “romance” seriously and see what happened.

The forms in these paintings pull directly from the visual language of wedding planning and dreaming about a future together: dress silhouettes, floor tiles, architectural arches, draped fabrics. The shapes are soft, ornamental, and sometimes teetering on the edge of decorative excess. It felt right. We were building a life through fragments and fantasy, and I wanted the work to reflect that kind of earnest construction.

The installation itself became a kind of imagined living room. Part sincere, part theatrical. I brought in a velvet loveseat, a floral rug, candles, dried flowers, and ceramic cats. It was deliberately over-the-top. A romantic space we hadn’t yet had, but were longing for. A place for us to sit together again, even if only in spirit. Viewers were invited to sit on the loveseat and take in two large paintings hung closely together. Intimate, quiet, and full of a kind of charge. I wanted to give people time and space to feel that closeness, to reflect, to project their own longing or tenderness onto the work.

The show holds a kind of tension: between closeness and separation, between crafted object and personal symbol, between homesickness and joy. It isn’t about being clever. It’s about making a big, emotional move. About exploring how sincerity and excess, humor and vulnerability, can live together in the same space. It’s about the romance of longing and the awkwardness of trying to express something real without defaulting to irony, cliché, or art-speak.

At the end of it all, we moved back in together and got married. That’s the real gesture. But this show was a love letter in the meantime.