Dallas Art Fair
April 20-23, 2023
Booth D5
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Travis Boyer, Amelia Lockwood,
Sophia Heymans & Fernanda Mello

The Valley is pleased to present new works by Travis Boyer, Amelia Lockwood,
Sophia Heymans & Fernanda Mello at the Dallas Art Fair in Dallas, TX, taking place from April 20-23, 2023. This will be the gallery’s second year participating in the fair, and we are thrilled to return to Dallas with a group presentation including three of our represented artists (Lockwood, Heymans, and Mello) alongside new works from Travis Boyer, with whom we shared a solo presentation at the Dallas Art Fair in 2022. The artists in our Dallas Art Fair presentation are united by their desire to explore humankind’s relationship to the natural world, but differ in the material approaches and visual language they use to explore this concept.

Sophia Heymans paints landscapes that are embedded with figuration. Faces and bodies materialize from trees, canyons, lakes and rivers, playing on humankind’s natural inclination to see ourselves in nature. By painting humans as physically and psychologically intertwined with their environment so that you cannot differentiate between them, the artist reminds us that we are intimately connected with the landscapes we inhabit.

Fernanda Mello, a self-taught artist who was born in the Amazon region of Brazil, desires to share indigenous narratives and cosmology through her abstract paintings, particularly the idea that we as humans are intertwined with every aspect of life in the natural world. She meticulously paints shapes that can be read as cellular organisms, celestial orbs, chains of beads, pearls, or shells. These meditative geometries become prayers of protection for indigenous cultures, people, and ecological systems.

Amelia Lockwood’s ceramic sculptures loosely take the form of candelabras, with tiny flames adorning their spires and peeking from beneath laicework and vines. Lockwood prioritizes an intuitive way of working, privileging the guidance imbued in the material of clay, and responding to her energetic surroundings. Lockwood was profiled in Patron Magazine’s “Fifteen for 15” feature of fifteen galleries and artists of note who will be exhibiting at the 15th anniversary of the Dallas Art Fair.

Building on the wonderful response to our presentation of Travis Boyer’s paintings in 2022, we will again share new works by Boyer in his home state. Created with dye on silk velvet, the surfaces of these works are soft and shimmery, sensuous in both subject maer and material. Known for his mushroom paintings which evoke forbidden, taboo, and trippy, Boyer’s paintings ask the viewer to examine their associations and explore their curiosity.