Suzanne Schireson Presented by Tiger Strikes Asteroid Greenville and the Art Gallery Boxes in Asheville, NC

76 Gertrude Place, Asheville, NC 135 Lookout Drive, Asheville, NC 65 Kenilworth Road, Asheville, NC 74 Tacoma Circle, Asheville, NC 30 Virginia Avenue, Asheville, NC

Tiger Strikes Asteroid Greenville is pleased to present INSIDE ROOM, an exhibition featuring Suzanne Schireson’s recent paintings.

In May, 2020, TSA GVL members Suzanne Dittenber and Luke Whitlatch launched a new proj ect: installing small art gallery boxes in residential areas throughout Asheville as a response to shuttered galleries and museums. Ongoing exhibitions in gallery boxes allow pedestrians to view works of art close to home.

This exhibition focuses on Suzanne Schireson’s paintings of mothers or caretakers finding a rare moment of solitude in provisional studio spaces of Schireson’s invention. Schireson paints these architectural spaces in an act of empathy for nocturnal women whose other responsibil ities dominate day-time hours. These works were made during quarantine, when solitary spaces were difficult to find and much time was given to caring for family. Schireson’s paint ings of women find that increasingly, the buildings struggle to hold them, or the women get to work before the structure is even complete. This often leaves an open edge between archi tecture and landscape, where a creative act starts to unlock the sky.

In the paintings, color acts as a driving force as acidic fluorescents are often paired with neu trals. The works are rooted in reality but are cast with an otherworldly light.

INSIDE ROOM takes its title from The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers (1940). Mc Cullers describes adolescent Mic Kelly having a secret space where she retreats at night to compose music in her mind and make plans. Occasionally Mic finds an abandoned location but mostly this “inside room” is located within her. After a series of tragedies Mic eventually loses access to this part of herself. The sorrow of this novel is partially redeemed imagining McCullers herself at work. Schireson marvels at McCullers ability to trust herself at 23 years old, to compose this work alone in a room as the sky shifted against her window.

Suzanne Schireson is an artist based in Providence, Rhode Island. Her work has been exhibited at The Woodmere Art Museum (Philadelphia, PA), the New Bedford Museum of Art (New Bed ford, MA), the Sori Art Center (Jeollabuk-do, South Korea), the Srimanta Sankaradeva Kalak shetra (Guwahati, Assam, India) and The Carrousel du Louvre (Paris, France). Suzanne attended Indiana University (M.F.A.‘08), the University of Pennsylvania (B.F.A.'04) and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (Certificate '03); she is an Associate Professor of Art and Design at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

Tiger Strikes Asteroid Greenville is the newest site of the Tiger Strikes Asteroid network of art ist-run spaces and joins locations Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. They are a platform for artists that is curated and organized by a group of artist-volunteers. Their mission is to create the physical, mental, and emotional space for artists to show their work, meet, and exchange ideas on their own terms. TSA GVL will specifically focus on connecting the art com munities in Greenville and the greater Southeast to the global art world. TSA was founded in 2009 in Philadelphia and is a 501c3 non-profit organization.