Lyles & King is pleased to present Time Bends for the Tender, a solo exhibition of Akea Brionne's work opening Friday, January 9, 6-8 pm. 

Drawing inspiration from bell hooks’ Sisters of the Yam, this series explores the interior landscape of black women cultivated in order to survive the psychic, social, and geographic pressures placed upon them.

The works explore how identity is shaped—softened, hardened, fragmented—and how the body learns to perform or mask itself within neurotypical, racialized, and gendered environments.  

The figures are situated inside vividly colored domestic spaces: bedrooms, plants, bedsheets, and architectural planes of pinks, greens, yellows, and blues. The interiors are not merely backdrops; they are emotional geographies, worlds built from memory, longing, and quiet defense. The saturated colors function like shields—both expressive and protective—suggesting ways that women learn to craft environments that can hold what the outside world cannot.

The concept of ‘masking’ emerges as a central gesture in the layered surfaces of the face and body. In several of the works, color bisects the figure—green across one side of the face, yellow or pink across the other—intended to evoke the subtle labor of self-editing: what is shown, what is hidden, what fractures under the pressure of being constantly perceived. Tears appear with painterly emphasis, but they are not singularly about sorrow; they mark release, rupture, and reclamation. They reveal what happens when the mask briefly slips and the interior becomes visible.

These portraits incorporate characteristics of Afro-surrealism, where the real and the emotional coexist without hierarchy. The distortions of scale; figures dwarfed by blankets or domestic plants, intend to capture how memory distorts time, how the past interacts with the present, and how interiority becomes a landscape of its own. The images carry sharp chromatic contrasts, embodying the tension between vulnerability and self-possession.

Across the series, I return to hooks’ notion of healing as an active practice: “a movement toward wholeness.” The series holds space for the exhaustion of constantly performing coherence, while also imagining what it means to rest, to soften, and to be witnessed without translation. The works map out the quiet rituals that sustain interior life—the beds we recover in, the rooms where we make ourselves, and the parts of us that flicker beneath the surface. 

Time Bends for the Tender is a meditation on the nonlinear, layered, and deeply felt experience of living in a body that must navigate both tenderness and tension. It honors the resilience of inner worlds, the beauty of stillness, and the possibility of existing beyond the mask.

– Akea Brionne