Oft-coarse artist Dee Dee Cheriel, whose exhibit at Brooklyn’s McCaig-Welles Gallery opens next Friday, August 3, has honed her unique aesthetic while experimenting with painting, silk screening, stenciling, and other media for over a decade.
Getting her start as a teenager, she rebelled against her Indian father’s wishes and founded several seminal female punk outfits (Hindi Guns is her most recent), which lead to the formation of her own record label. In creating stencils and silkscreens for shirts and album covers, Cheriel developed the crude, visceral tendencies that remain in her work today.
After having gone abroad to paint with other artists and absorb what she could from the folk cultures of Latin countries like Chile and Honduras, Cheriel returned to the states with a better understanding for the binary qualities within herself as well as those that shape everyday life. Her paintings, composed of a variety of media, balance these oppositional qualities as precariously as Cheriel finds them.
Her solo exhibit, which is the first of its kind in New York and titled Into the Stars and Always Up, will display work that elucidates the tension between urban/natural and punk/folk elements characterizing the artist’s perception of herself and her surroundings.
Deedee Cheriel, Into the Stars and Always Up
August 3 – September 2
McCaig-Welles Gallery
129 Roebling Street Suite B
Brooklyn, NY 11211
(718) 384-8729
www.mccaigwelles.com