Rives Wiley Featured in Hyperallergic  

Hyperallergic featured VillageOneArt co-artist Rives Wiley brought originality, humor, and curiosity to Sunset Park’s most recent open studios event.

Wiley, one of the artists participating in Sunset Park’s most recent open studios event, has a cubicle in J&M Studios, which operates 65 studios and is currently at full capacity. She runs a commissions-based business selling portraits, murals, and abstract paintings and recently designed a trompe l’oeil set for the fashion designer Wiederhoeft. Victorian steampunk models wearing structured neck corsets and larval face masks descend the fake steps in a video she plays on a laptop. The horror underlying the runway show rhymes with that conveyed by Wiley’s work on canvas, which features domestic and suburban breakdown scenes.

“During the pandemic, everything was so politically charged. I couldn’t paint anything except a man, a woman, and plants,” Wiley explains, as we stand before the aptly titled “Man Woman Plants” (2021). “I was like, ‘I’m going to make a painting all white, black, some plants, less colors, and buy the most generic stock photos I can find.’ I wanted to go crazy with it and see how I could make this situation wrong — because it is wrong,” she adds. A few features are impressed — the plastic plant plugged into a wall socket, the splattering milk on the tablecloth coffee, the flattened coffee machine — all while repressing an undeniably brewing sense of existential dread.