Danielle Orchard

Jack Hanley Gallery is pleased to present ‘A Little Louder, Love’ the first solo exhibition by Brooklyn based painter Danielle Orchard. The title of the exhibition is borrowed from the lyrics by singer-songwriter Connie Converse, whose music only received attention decades after her active recordings in the 1950s in New York. Like Converse’s songs, Orchards paintings explore the interior life of women, while blending their narratives into modernist Western painting history.

Orchard’s own common surroundings and narratives as a female artist become subject and setting of her new paintings: artists studios, painting scenes, studio visits, or the display of institutional rejection letters. The female figure and the variety in which it is presented: thoughtful, distant, vigorous or humorous, becomes placeholder for Orchard’s own personal experiences.

Fragmented bodies, compositions and coloration reference a modern painting language. Opaque application of paint and fauvist levels of saturation are combined with poses and gestures used in Analytical Cubism, Italian Renaissance or Chicago Imaginists. Orchard revisits a time in art history in which the female figure was used to indicate hidden psychological positions among their mainly male painters. As Danielle Orchard is placing these characters in her own contemporary surroundings, she gives voice to their largely omitted narratives. In multi-faceted perspectives and broken up bodies she bridges the gaps of their pasts with her own memories.