CURATORIAL STATEMENT

As founder of The Parrot Club, I am pleased to present a solo exhibition of Anne Sherwood Pundyk's newest work, “The Architecture of Concealment,” at The Parrot Club in Brooklyn.

Pundyk's work is rooted in generational trauma that was never openly addressed. She inherited not just the weight of what was long ago experienced, but the patterns of secrecy surrounding it: watchfulness, coded communication, the instinct to cover. Her studio practice has become a space to immerse in those patterns, using the very materials of the domestic environment where the silence took shape: utility canvas, hardware store paint, sewing machine, scissors. Her process employs the very mechanics of concealing—through cropping, stitching, staining, and burying under layers of paint. And yet, in the same stroke that we see her hide, we see her testing what it means to choose, deliberately, to reveal.

This exhibition presents works across four series. While each one depicts a different stage in the lifecycle of hiding, they manifest as coexisting states. The first series is two paintings; stitched on canvas and mounted on wood panel, we see swathes of color stain vertical structures to establish the show's tension between showing and hiding. What's exposed in these works is not an artist's trauma, but an artist's hand weary from constantly coloring over truth.

The second series is two large-scale paintings — News Reel and Austin. Amid the tension, they edge toward the ultimate rupture. Sweeping circles, brilliant arcs, and stains of yellow and green seem to break free. The underlying geometric scaffolding — grids, hard-edged blocks of red and blue, dense crosshatched fields — become ruins of an order once imposed. But only for a moment. This opera of color is staged on unstretched canvases stitched together by dangling threads. The rupture is confined by the ruins they create, and the cycle starts again.

Maybe the truth can be found on "the cutting room floor." The third series is a collection of collages built from the unused scraps of Pundyk's other work. Made from the material that she hid from view before, they now prove the lengths she will go to once again obscure. Instead of clawing a way back out, she serendipitously crafts a way back in, further steeping Pundyk in her own mechanisms of control.

Only in the final series — Skate and Crown — do we see Pundyk at her most unguarded. These two small ink drawings show spare marks, dotted lines, delicate geometry on bare white paper. But with the architecture of concealment stripped away, there is less for the viewer to see. If there is, at last, resolution within the artist, it is internal and hidden, once more.

As curator Helen A. Harrison has observed, Pundyk's work "suggests that understanding requires another interpretive tool, or perhaps a personal surrender to a deeper, less accessible, level of cognition." The dynamics she navigates — enforced silence, buried truths surfacing through layered processes, the circular work of making the invisible visible and vice versa — mirror the dynamics any society faces when confronting what it has chosen to bury. Her work models a posture of self-directed inquiry, inviting the viewer to sit inside the structures she has built and discover meaning for themselves.

And yet a paradox runs through Pundyk's practice: freedom is found not by escaping but by inhabiting. Her artistic life itself began this way, through a grandmother — an artist herself — who carved out space for expression simply by drawing in Pundyk’s presence, modeling creative freedom from within the very system of family silence. And so, exhibiting at The Parrot Club is a fitting choice. A Brooklyn gallery for the community, artists, and friends, the space is also my apartment, where I insist visitors take off their shoes to enter. Here at The Parrot Club, Pundyk's paintings aren't positioned within their usual critical framework. They're shown in the kind of setting her work comes from — domestic, warm, intimate. What's more, The Parrot Club operates on its own mechanics of hiding. To exhibit art, I have crafted modular furniture that disassembles to hide inside closets. I erected wall partitions to conceal thermostats, door buzzers, and circuit breakers. I installed ceiling lights to restage my living room. And yet, if you look carefully — or perhaps not so carefully — a person's quiet home shows through. For both the art on exhibit and the gallery space itself, what hides beneath gives the surface its charge.

Perhaps it is also fitting that Anne is my relative — a cousin once removed. Among the attendees of the show will be our family whose generational lines extend to the heart of Anne's work. Together, this community — a cropped and stitched community of curator, artist, art viewer, friend, and family — will participate in constructing an architecture of concealment, where each one of us is in charge of a revelation of our own. Because Anne's paintings don't decode a single hidden message. They put the craft and cost of hiding on display, where radiant color pushes against geometric restraint, and the dance between the truth and what masks it becomes something we can all see and dwell inside.

— Dylan Greif, Founder and Principal Curator at The Parrot Club