In her new body of work Tricia Wright has created fascinating hybrids, paintings which blend organic incident with an investigation into our processes of visual response. Pairing her precise pouring techniques with crisply rendered and collaged references to pattern, design, and vernacular architecture, Wright has created highly charged, theatrical spaces which suggest the strain between natural forces and the ways in which they are tamed, civilized, and brought indoors. With chiming harmonics of bright pure color Wright plays wonderful tricks in these intense parlors pitting ambiguous spatial effects against fully frontal areas of flattened paint festooned with ornament. In her use of figures derived from the grammar of ornament, Wright explores their latent symbolic content and mines the subliminal messages that they contain. Her pivotal group of "Belljar" pieces signal an important shift of focus and intent for the artist, one that weaves the pop formalism of her previous body of work into a subtle consideration of domestic tension. With their implication that within the protective enclosure of the belljar other pressures and dangers still lurk, these works open a dialogue into the quietly feminist concerns that are the underpinning of this series. Writing about her work in 2002, Wright stated that, "...mystery and irony are tools that I use to create independent meaning. I seek forms that are abstract and yet able to stir feelings of recognition." In her new paintings Tricia Wright presents us with mysteries of a new sort, glossy, yet vaguely unsettling, bright, yet suggestive of a carefully hidden darkness. These are interior spaces whose clear crisp surfaces carry with them clarity and order, but with a hint of the unease sometimes felt in an empty room.

-Julian Jackson

Born and educated in England, Tricia Wright lives and works in Irvington,NY. She has exhibited widely in England and the United States. This is her second solo exhibition at Metaphor. Her first, in 2002, was accompanied by a catalogue with an essay by critic Lilly Wei. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Observer, Modern Painters, The New York Times, The Guardian (London) and elsewhere. Wright's work is represented in many public and private collections including those of the MetroMedia Corporation, NYC, the Hove Museum of Art, England, The University of Wales, UK, and David Bowie, among others.