STIM (a self-stimulatory behavior that is marked by a repetitive action or movement of the body)

STIM is Lindsey Rome's first solo exhibition showcasing her abstract oil paintings and colored pencil drawings. The skeins of deeply saturated color created by her heavy touch on paper and the boulders of lush pigment in the paintings are an amalgamation of broad swaths of mid-century sensibility, summoning Marsden Hartley, Arshile Gorky, Shel Silverstien, and Maria Lasnig. The results beg a range of interpretations -- evoking maps, puzzles, seussian caves, or medical graphing -- joyous and mysterious at once.

Begun in 2015, the labyrinthine detail in Rome’s work required countless hours of intense focus and self-forgetfulness. For years, she focused on developing intricate detail in her colored pencil drawings. Only after developing bursitis in her shoulder from pushing so hard with the pencils, did she transition to larger oil paintings in the same vein. Full of tiny twists and turns and contrasting pigments, the paintings themselves are a study in persistence and what she calls “color therapy.”

Within days of scheduling her solo debut with ZieherSmith, Rome received news from a diagnostician that she is autistic. These two seemingly disparate events — an invitation and a diagnosis — helped affirm to the artist the absolute necessity of her artistic practice, which focuses on sinuous, repetitive movements within the works.

Long before her own diagnosis, Rome had absorbed herself in research about autism in response to her son's (also surprising) autistic diagnosis. She was struck by the abundance of contemporary negative associations and misunderstandings, as well as a terrible history of treatments including inhumane institutionalizations and electro-shock therapies conducted on autistic children for exhibiting “stimming,” or self-stimulatory behavior marked by repetitive action or movement.

Often listening to these stories while creating the works that would come to comprise this show, Rome learned to embrace her son’s neurodivergence while wholeheartedly rejecting messages of shame. Then came her own diagnosis — which came less as a shock, she says, and more as a relief.

“The clarifying effect that I experienced cannot be overstated," she says. “After my diagnosis, when I looked again at my work I had a revelation: this a way that I stim. There had always been a vague feeling in me of ‘Why am I doing this?’ What is the actual point!?’ Through this new lens, I am coming to understand many things about myself.”

Born in Columbus, Ohio, Lindsey Rome received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York. She currently lives and works in Nashville, TN.