Meghan Brady: All One Song

May 3 - June 7, 2025

The Pit Los Angeles

The Pit is pleased to present “All One Song,” Rockland, Maine-based artist Meghan Brady’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view from May 3 - June 7, 2025 at The Pit Los Angeles with an opening reception on Saturday May 3, 2025 from 5-7pm.

All One Song reads (and sounds) like a mantra: three stressed syllables of rounded vowels that resolve in a low-register slant rhyme and can be spliced into a kind of aural trigonometry. All One Song. All one, One song. All song.

Meghan Brady’s paintings converse through this logic of permutations. She works using an A-frame easel, a fitting foundation for the rough-hewn geometry of the paintings’ compositions. Her images are culled from an alphabet of stripes, triangles, half-circles, and ambiguous shapes that can be variously read as hands or flowers. The speculative (re)arrangements of shapes have, as they say, “good bones,” like the vernacular wooden architecture of the Victorian houses and rooflines in Rockland, Maine, the town on the Atlantic Ocean where Brady’s studio is located in a former high school classroom. A room is a structure is a stanza is a unit of song.

Brady applies paint decisively in opaque and semi-transparent passages with a painting knife that sometimes trusts in the Albersian hard-edge meeting of two colors to build space. She also balks at the maintenance of rigorous formalism. In Arrival Time, a cross of x and y axes deals simultaneously in symbolisms and discontinuities that suggest a window and a tree, and perhaps a little wonder. We are neither here nor there, but the image is made with an unselfconscious urgency akin to the drawing of a child who does not yet know what it is to diagram a sentence, parse verb from noun. I want to be back there, this painting seems to hum, in the unknowing yet intuitive assembly of an outfit, a day, a drawing with a dying marker, before one learns that a painting can be overworked—or—can it?

To answer that question, Brady’s painting project is imbued with rules of its own making, a freedom that I associate with Joan Brown and Etel Adnan, who built decisive languages of color, form, and space with a sense of unencumbered, first-person lucidity. The paintings in All One Song are devoted to a palette of pulsing pinks, peaches, greens, and oranges. The work is generous in its hopeful luminosity, in the way a tube of cadmium orange often seems to give pigment years beyond its means. It wasn’t a surprise when the mixer of this palette confessed to me that as a child, she once tried the taste of her mother’s lipstick. Color runs deep. Yet these paintings locate restraint in the palette’s consistency, and in the way that the paint colors only ever mix through scumbled and layered opticality. This gestures to a process of collage, and, more broadly, to paper and its edge. Despite the accumulation of material, these paintings feel less about the turn of the tide and more about the turn of a page.

Across the diagonal of two envelope triangles, Emily Dickinson writes: “We introduce / ourselves / To Planets and to Flowers / But with / ourselves / Have Etiquettes / Embarrassments / And awes.” “Awes” turns to “gauze,” the white that is scraped across Brady’s Soft Assemblies, pushing back the sweetness of a pink and green garden, what would have been a perfect rhyme: it had to go. Yet within the white is the shape of two new flowers that hold history and seem equally to be about presence, absence, failure, trust. The gestural scraping of the knife is a movement that comes from the wrist, the maker close to the surface, a form of marginalia: with distinctive clarity, Brady is writing and singing this song all at once.

- Eleanor Conover

For further information, please contact the gallery at info@the-pit.la.

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