Three Brides is a series of photographs taken from different issues of Life magazine. Each photograph depicts a bride-to-be and suggests a more complex story than the conventional happily-ever-after narrative. The archetypal man-and-wife/love-and-marriage scenario is seemingly absent in these images; instead each offers a contemplative scene - the bride is solitary in her thoughts challenging the ideal of finding completion in another person. 



Bride No.1 (Hope)

Bride No.2 (Faith)

Bride No.3 (Prudence)

Couple on the Beach 
The Dayroom, St. John's, NL 
July 13 - September 17, 2016



Alyssa Matthews (Brooklyn, NYC)
Sarah Sands Phillips (Toronto, ON)
Hazel Eckert (St. John's, NL)
Walter George (Conception Harbour, NL)

Documentation by Noah Bender

Stella: Maybe one day she'll find her happiness.
 
Jeff: Yeah, some man'll lose his.

 
– Rear Window (1954)

The Dayroom is proud to present artists Alyssa Matthews, Sarah Sands Phillips, Hazel Eckert and Walter George as part of our inaugural exhibition and public opening. Couple on the Beach takes its name from the iconic 1954 painting by Alex Colville (1920-2013). In the painting, a woman lays on her side, the curve of her body forming the contour of the horizon. Her face is hidden by a straw hat. A man, crouched at the knees, faces the woman, his back to the viewer. Both the male and female figures possess independence while occupying a space of unfeigned intimacy. In typical Colville fashion, the languor of a day at the beach is offset by invisible, hovering disquiet: a private scene simmering with danger and violence. Couple on the Beach takes note of the richness of Colville's composition and re-positions the figurative painting through discretionary references to hot sand, threat, closeness, emptiness, man and woman, fields of vision and desire.



– Penelope Smart, The Dayroom




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