Alison Blickle, "Goodbye, Golden State"
Richard Heller Gallery
Opening Reception: Saturday, February 13, 2010, 5–7p
On View February 13 – March 12, 2010
Richard Heller Gallery is pleased to present Goodbye, Golden State, a solo exhibition of paintings by New York-based artist Alison Blickle. Alison’s practice is admittedly a way for the artist to live out her daydreams, which often have everything to do with connecting to her inner animal and leaving the confines of city-living far behind. Her “protagonists” (loosely based on herself) are naked or scantily clad, hyper-sexualized, and seemingly fearless creatures, who stroll through, laze about, act up, and seduce in various natural settings. To her subjects, the wilderness is a fantasy world where they not only bond to their environment—sometimes quite literally—but where their surroundings reciprocate by coming alive before them—again sometimes quite literally.
Interestingly, the juxtaposition often appears to be purposefully awkward and conflicted: though feral, the subjects are also highly kempt, and though natural, the settings seem overly zealous. The contradiction on the one hand and the exaggeration on the other, ultimately point to an unwritten, or in this case unpainted answer, in which the true liberation of Alison’s alter ego happens on a more realistic playing field.
--Leslie Rosa, Parlour, New York, NY
Alison received her MFA from Hunter College in 2009 and has exhibited extensively in New York and California. She was recently featured in a group exhibition of new MFA graduates curated by Jeffrey Deitch at Deitch Projects. Alison lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and Los Angeles.
www.richardhellergallery.com
