The pedestrian notion that art should "match the sofa" is one universally abhorred in loftier art circles. Somehow - even in an age that prides itself on blurring categorical boundaries - the idea that "decorative" art is not "serious," or at least not "fine," persists. But Candy Depew is an artist who has no fear of engaging the lowlier, decorative arts in her installations and sculptures. She borrows freely from the vocabulary of interior design, referencing wallpaper patterns fabric designs and porcelain bric-a-brac. And while all that glitters is not exactly (or even remotely) gold, Depew draws an unusual richness from the combinations of color, pattern and historical allusion she employs. This grammar of ornament, Depew's work suggests, can be used to form a rhetoric by which the various dialects of design, decorative, and fine arts may be persuasively reconciled. One imagines some great summit meeting between these powers happily signing an armistice agreement in one of Depew's installations. All of this occurs in a madly biomorphic baroque, a playful interchange of nature and culture. As in traditional decorative arts, where nature is tamed and teased into elaborate and ideal arcs for upholstery and ornament, the outdoors comes inside in lurid leaves and landscapes. All too often, decorative art is domesticated in display settings - set apart in period rooms or caged in vitrines where its threatening proximity to everyday life will not inflect (or, God forbid, diminish) adjacent works of art. The constantly changing relationship we have to our stuff - the kitchenware, the furniture, and the ornaments that enliven our spaces - is frozen in a kind of museological amber, conserved like painting and sculpture and transformed into a relic. In the proliferation of botany and ornament in her work, Depew restores some of the tension that underlies decoration. Looking at her work, we wait anxiously for an explosion of leaves or clouds or unnamable organic energy to burst through and smother us all.

Depew received her B.F.A. from Kent State University, Ohio, and her M.F.A. from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia. She also studied at Newcomb School of Art, Tulane University, in New Orleans, La. Her work has been exhibited at The Clay Studio, The Rosenbach Museum and Library, Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial, Vox Populi Gallery, and the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery of The University of the Arts, all in Philadelphia. Sunrise,Sunset is a permanent installation of an apartment interior that she created for Temple Gallery in Philadelphia. In addition to her work as a master printer/project coordinator at The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Depew is currently a resident artist at The Clay Studio. In 1999 she received an Emerging Artist Grant from the Leeway Foundation.