On View: Sad Rider

SAD RIDER

A Solo Exhibition by Tori Tinsley

On View: October 3, 2025 - January 10, 2026

Reception with the Artist: Thursday, October 23, 6-8pm

With Sad Rider, Tori Tinsley’s multi-scale paintings and ceramic sculptures illuminate a protagonist on horseback in a fairy tale that goes awry right in front of our eyes. But then again, many fairy tales do take a dark path. The rider in Tinsley’s narrative is a woman who is braced for the worst. She and her beastly companions are filled with dread. Yet they are poised to defend if necessary, even when the enemy lurks within. Tinsley’s work in this series joins her past explorations of relationships through her characters’ embodiment of deeply felt emotions.

We live in an age of anxiety, yet each era has offered reasons for concern. Prior to WWI the painter Wassily Kandinsky identified the artist as a rider on horseback, symbolically riding forth to achieve universal harmony through color, space, and energized form. Tinsley’s work centers the artist-rider in her own story – a heroine who feels woefully unprepared as a person of privilege reckoning with her false sense of security. She is confronted with an increasing sense of oppression that she thought was behind her, but which she must now stand up against and fight.

Recognizing a collective sense of dread, and inspired by complex layers of lived experience, Sad Rider also engages the challenges of being an artist and a mother, as well as being the adult child left to defend herself. The artist’s own mother, a lover of horses, suffered from depression and is here given a second chance to do battle with forces which held her back. But this is only one of many layers of personal and universal meaning.

Sad Rider deploys the fairy tale as a way to stare down contemporary challenges to body, mind, and power. Inundated with TikTok snippets of “truth,” laced with more than a dash of trad-wife fantasy, women are freshly burdened with shocking limitations to life and liberty. Tinsley’s work wonders aloud about such burdens, as well as the current obsession for formulaic “romantasy" – a revival of interest in escapist fiction amongst women readers. Paintings and sculptures interweave as moments in the narrative, fusing humor and dread, desire and violence. Tinsley’s scenes playfully embrace fairy tale tropes while rejecting a time-worn story of rescue. The heroine is supposed to be her own savior, even when the challenges feel insurmountable. Meanwhile, the prince recognizes that his pending rescue has been a fiction all along.

In The Castle, the rider with her sword at the ready initiates an arduous journey of wending through the cultural landscape (full of cacti with spines) toward her prize, the cake-like castle on the hill. But a storm looms above. An unknown threat crouches in the dark cave below, ready to pounce. Tinsley’s paintings provide cartoonish physicality to everyday life, to the feeling of confronting or avoiding known adversaries and villains. Throughout the gallery, time and space unfold in the narrative like a loaded, heavy sigh as we identify with archetypal feelings. Does anyone have it all figured out? Are we doing enough? How do we effectively take action? Do we find comfort in recognizing that no one really has it all figured out, or is this what creates angst in the first place? Tori Tinsley’s work shares the rider’s ambivalent journey and leaves it open for us to re-consider: Where is the beginning? What happens in the middle? And how does the story turn out in The End?

To download the press release, click here