The Spoils: Maddie Stratton Opening: Saturday, March 15, 6-9 PM
Exhibition Dates: March 15-April 6, 2025
Good Children Gallery is excited to present The Spoils, paintings by Maddie Stratton. Join us for the opening reception on Saturday, March 15th, from 6 PM to 9 PM.
The Spoils
Grab a cup! Grab a plate! Fill it with drink! Fill it with food!
The animals in this park welcome you, witnessing your revelry from afar. Out of their hiding places, they emerge: the pigeons, raccoons, and squirrels. They will relish your crumbs, collect your shiny treasures, make homes from discarded cups, and fight over the carcasses of the fried chicken you left behind. It doesn't take long for them to move in: they will have their own desperate party, competing to see who will take the most.
Trash cans overflowing, popped balloons hanging on a cat claw-covered chain link fence, paper plates piled with food, a birthday cake slice forgotten under a napkin, spilled wine spreading fast across the tablecloth-The Spoils are what's left when you leave the party early.
The Spoils considers what we leave behind, the single-use items that don't disappear when they are discarded. Set under the cast of a late afternoon sun, these scenes ponder the afterparty. Has everyone retreated, forgetting to clean up? Or have the humans disappeared in some catastrophic event? What happened is unclear but the evidence is incontrovertible: only humans leave parties (and messes) like this.
Maddie Stratton's obsession with color and light comes mostly from growing up in the lush city of New Orleans. After receiving her BFA from Pratt Institute (2013), she returned to her hometown in 2014 to pursue a deeper interest in painting. Maddie is a recent Good Children Gallery member and also a member of the Aquarium Gallery and Studios collective. She has shown work in the Louisiana Contemporary Juried Exhibition at the Ogden Museum of Contemporary Art and Sibyl Gallery, among many other group shows. She also participated in the Azule and Vashon Artist residencies. She recently installed a solo exhibition, Interloper, at the Java Project in Brooklyn, New York. Maddie lives and works in New Orleans and also works as a scenic painter for a Mardi Gras float company, but she spends most of her time working on her own paintings in her studio at the Aquarium Gallery in the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans.
Maddie's work explores the relationships and experiences between humans and animals, blurring the lines between encroaching presence and symbiotic existence.
Using a surreal atmosphere and bright, unnatural colors, these paintings take inspiration from the whimsy and satire often found in children's stories. These scenes create an idyllic but surreal landscape of figures and animals existing in harmony, while suggesting a more complicated perspective of intrusion, asking the question, "who is encroaching upon whom?"
This will be her first solo exhibition at Good Children Gallery!