September 9 - October 28, 2023

Life after death. A candle flickers. Like after death, the light is gone. Enveloped in darkness the holy spirit runs rampant. Leaving presence on all things matter.

M. LeBlanc is proud to present the gallery’s second solo exhibition with Virginia-born, Chicago-based artist Cameron Spratley, titled ‘Violets and Daisies’, the exhibition brings together a body of work the artist has been developing over the past two years.

Where implements of violence - bats, knives, billy clubs, often frame Spratley’s compositional decisions, the works exhibited are a mediated departure from abrasive subjects. They are an embrace of aftermath, and a solemn exploration into recollection and the creation of memory from personal and public tragedy. 

The candles through Violets and Daisies function much like the screws and knives of Spratley's 2020/2021 works. Melting under the pressure of posturing, the candle's omnipotent and ephemeral light source is flattened to a pixelated print. Taken as a gesture to the material-transcendent philosophies of late Renaissance painting, and without regard to their new mediated rendering, Spratley's paintings radiate, endeavoring to push the lit or unlit candle past its traditional symbology of god's presence/non-presence. Mortal in this sense: ready to die: human. A wake for those remiss.

True to Spratley's approach in constructing an image, Violets and Daisies reflects on this aesthetic and asks how we romanticize the passage of time, define our rituals of mourning, and meditate on loss today.

Cameron Spratley (American, b. 1994 in Manassas, VA) lives and works in Chicago. Recent solo exhibitions of Spratley’s work include AmericanPortraiture (2023) at Moskowitz Bayse in Los Angeles, In the Air Tonight (2021) at James Fuentes in New York, Caged Bird Songs (2021) at James Fuentes (Online) in New York, and 730 (2020) at M. LeBlanc in Chicago. Spratley’s work was included in recent group exhibitions, Homotopy Type Theory (2023) at Centralbanken in Oslo, SKIN+MASKS (2022) at Kavi Gupta in Chicago, A Healthy Dose of Nihilism (2022) at the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Columbus, OH, Sagittarius (2022) at Night Club Gallery in Minneapolis, Made to be Broken (2022) at P.P.O.W. in New York, Songs of Fire (2022) at Kranzberg Arts Foundation in St. Louis, Moloch (2021) at M. LeBlanc, Chicago, and Notes on Entropy (2020) at Arcadia Missa in London. Spratley obtained his bachelor's degree in 2016 from Virginia Commonwealth University. He attended the Yale University at Norfolk residency, was the recipient of the Alice Cabell Horsely Parker Scholarship from Virginia Commonwealth University, and received a full tuition scholarship from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago where he completed his MFA. In 2021, Spratley collaborated with filmmaker Jordan Peele and his firm Monkeypaw Productions on the remake of Candyman, set in Chicago.