RETRACE

Friday, September 7th, 2007 — Sunday, September 30th, 2007

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

RETRACE is a solo exhibition featuring work by Guest Artist Alison Owen.

Statement from the artist:

My installations develop a parasitic relationship with the host space. They quietly invade the environment, altering it in significant yet subtle ways, without dominating the space. The work hangs back in a way that is passive aggressive- it appears to be agreeable, pale. retiring, and yet is entrenched in its environment, with deeper roots than are initially suspected. The longer one spends with the work, the more one is able to parse it from its surroundings. What appears to be a shadow is a thin strip of grey paint. A tiny strip of patterned wallpaper merges with similarly colored watercolor strips, painstakingly painted. I engage the undenying elements that make up works of art - not just the image on the picture plane, but the edges of that picture plane, the wall behind the work, the light that shines on it, etc.

I focus on the peripheral, in all of its definitions- the edge of things, the minor, and the unimportant. I select materials that have an understated color and texture, delighting in their ability to blend with a wall or shadow while still asserting a low-level visual interference that insists its presence.

Although I never actually use a pencil, I consider my practice to be drawing-based. The line quality that achieve with thread, narrow strips of wood, and cut paper is carefully controlled. spent many hours learning to draw, from still life and the figure, and I have brought from that practice the ability to capture a sense of density and light through a delicately modulated line. My work balances the sculptural with the two dimensional. I explore the spatial qualities of a line, drawing it out into space to engage with the environment. The compositions are built piece by piece out of assembled fragments, but the fluid wholeness of each composition coheres the incremental construction.

I have always been interested in narrative structure and fiction. I gravitate toward writers who balance the meandering with the concise, and who choose to tell a story from an almost peripheral viewpoint, or from multiple viewpoints - Lydia Davis, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf. I employ similar methods in my art practice. The work has a starting point that one could follow along the wall. The subtle shifts in material, color, and composition create a rambling poem that splits off, stops and starts again, begins new stories, fades away. Elements hover in the periphery. Sometimes a startling revelation is half hidden or a beautiful detail balances on the threshold of perception. work towards a poetic reinterpretation of space, within a flexible grammar of materials and systems. With sparse, delicate materials, I create evocative and compelling environments, which invite the viewers into the slow process of investigation.