Erin Cluley Gallery is pleased to announce Red rum punch, an exhibition of work by Fort Worth-based artist Rachel Livedalen. The exhibition will debut new small-scale paintings continuing the artist’s eclectic sampling of mass-produced ephemera, pop cultural design, and Greco-Roman motifs. Reducing artifacts from antiquity and contemporary culture to their base shapes and colors, Livedalen’s paintings show the evolution of design through Western history. Her multidisciplinary work incorporates printmaking techniques including stenciling and screen-printing with abstract paint application; Red Rum Punch takes a distinctly loose approach to the commercial influence entrenched in girlhood and history of standardized feminine beauty.

Rachel Livedalen’s painting practice seamlessly melds techniques from printmaking, assemblage, and found-image collage. Her layered compositions often mirror, and subtly critique, the perfectionist aesthetics of advertising design; however, abstract color fields and complex cultural references reveal Livedalen’s hand in her work. The artist’s breadth of reference spans Grecian pottery, Cher vinyl record packaging, Lisa Frank sticker sheets, as well as many other design iconographies. Livedalen’s precise compositions blur the historical and cultural divides between her expansive allusions to female adolescence.

Red rum punch oscillates between celebration and critique of the Western lineage of societies influence on young women. Livedalen’s artistic dedication to this misrepresented and undervalued history casts a humorous shadow over the dominating masculine narratives of childhood. Her painting, Harmony, sort of (2024), uses snaking lines of ying yang stickers and Greco-Roman busts to show the lightheartedness of commercial ephemera and the genuine enjoyment children derive from simple design. This work eschews adult narratives of productivity and seriousness to celebrate elements of play in art. In her paintings, Livedalen places the value of varied references on equal footing, allowing viewers to contemplate their intersecting journeys throughout history.

Rachel Livedalen’s newest exhibition of work sees her reducing the scale of her paintings without sacrificing potency. The artist’s condensed narratives of female adolescence seriously consider the lineage of art as it intersects with commercialized pop culture.
The exhibition’s title, Red rum punch, showcases her tongue-in-cheek exploration of this bold-font and technicolor world. Livedalen suggests a form of critique without condemnation—where we can enjoy the sentimentality and sincerity of contemporary life.

Red rum punch will be the artist’s fourth solo presentation with Erin Cluley Gallery. It will be exhibited concurrently with Clay an exhibition of contemporary ceramics.

Rachel Livedalen (b. 1988; Denville, NJ) received a BA in Studio Art and Art History from the University of Virginia (2010). In 2014, she received a graduate certificate from the University of Iowa Center for the Book and an MFA in Printmaking from the University of Iowa. Livedalen’s creative research explores contemporary femininity through the lens of past histories and mythologies. She shifts the focus of a previously male-centric field while simultaneously questioning the role of privilege in how arbitrary value is assigned.

Livedalen has shown her work widely, including solo and group exhibitions at Snap Gallery, Alberta, Canada; Ivester Contemporary, Austin, TX; Erin Cluley Gallery, Dallas, TX; IS Projects, Fort Lauderdale, FL; Fort Worth Contemporary Arts, TX; Wichita Falls Museum of Art, TX; Well Well Projects, Portland, OR; Mulvane Art Museum, Topeka, KS; and Bradbury Art Museum, Arkansas State University, Jonesboro, AR. In 2021 she received an artist residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA). Livedalen was the recipient of the 2017-2018 Kala Fellowship Award from the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, CA and was accepted into the 2018 Artist Program at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, PA.

Rachel Livedalen is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Texas Christian University (TCU) in Fort Worth, Texas. She has taught at TCU since 2014 and heads the printmaking area. Livedalen currently lives and works in Fort Worth, TX.