Imaginary FriendsSolo Show by Amy Vidra

Imaginary Friends

A Retrospective Consisting of the Air, Land, And Sea Series, with bodies of work in the Baggage, Boats, and Site/Sight Lines Series

Imaginary Friends is the culmination of three series over 2023 and 2024 all connected by the examination of diving into family, self, perceptions, and the search for answers and understanding, challenging my own perceptions of what is near or far, up or down, past or present. Finding solace in the simple and raw forms, repetitious meditative weaving and knotting, and finding a safe space and a place of calm, Imaginary Friends emerged. The Baggage series explores the baggage we carry over time, that accumulates, that we hold onto, and that we discard, examining family lineage and generational baggage. In the Boat and Site/Sight Lines series’, the boats sit with the rawness and stillness of time, with the site/sight lines of the horizon in the distance, directing their course. The rawness of the boats become vessels of my present; sitting, carrying, holding, or transporting, but these boats do not float and cannot sail. The materials outline their capacity to voyage and inform their fate. The combination of the contradictions in this, open the spectrum of dichotomy of materials; each lending way to soft, hard, heavy, light. The boats hold my present, and the sight lines of the simplistic, stripped down, almost architectural building blocks, give view to the unknown future, while the oceanic ink paintings document horizons in the distance. Almost watching from above as observers or guides, hang the insinuation of birds or air dwellers, all connected by raw materials and often stitched together by a thread, while below as if underwater, organic barnacleesque forms sit still in the calm. Combined as an installation as a whole rather than one piece individually, this exhibit combines and transforms narratives of past, present, and future, connecting and integrating old and new Imaginary Friends.