Lesley Heller Gallery
Amanda C. Mathis: Collage Dwellings
July 17 – August 17, 2019
Lesley Heller is pleased to present a solo exhibition of recent small-scale multi-media collages by Amanda C. Mathis in the Project Space. Predominantly known for her large-scale site-specific installations which often incorporate discarded elements from DIY renovations, Mathis’ small-scale collages bring these larger conversations on domestic space into a more intimate and personal scale. Her works are explorations on the everyday architecture of dwellings and the overlapping yet disjointed elements of how we recollect and piece together the places we pass on a daily basis.
“I am interested in the ordinary details of our domestic architecture” Mathis states, “and how they can portray feelings about place and time.” These everyday elements take center stage in her work, especially in the form of window and door elements, which act as the connecting features that bind each collaged element together. Like an incomplete memory, Mathis’ collages are made up of fragments pieced together with a logic uniquely their own; forming structures that feel at once familiar and disorienting.
Al the images used in the collages were taken by Mathis in either Brooklyn or Queens. They are photographs she has captured while walking through these neighbourhoods on a daily basis; a way of connecting and identifying the reoccurring elements in the buildings. They highlight the everyday architecture of the mundane and how some forms of architecture can be very regional and specific.
In one of the newer pieces, Memory Study 11 , 2018, materials previously used only in her installation and assemblage work have directly carried over into the collages. The upholstery and linoleum flooring—taken from one of these buildings—form an interesting conversation with the photographs and imply the abstract nature of the fragmented and sometimes lost memories that that are tied to a place.
Photos courtesy of Lesley Heller Gallery.
DisPlace at SPRING/BREAK Art Show
Curated by Karin Bravin
March 6 – 12, 2018
Karin Bravin will present three artists working in three different media that explore the idea of a voyage into the unknown. Each world is personal and familiar but strange and foreign.
Shiri Mordechay invents an anthropomorphic society filled with embattled figures, animals and natural forces, a journey through the mind. Jerry Saltz wrote, in his review of Mordechay's 2008 exhibition "Shiri Mordechay gives us a topsy-turvy world of mundane and mad images…It's Charles Adams meets Edgar Allen Poe meets Animal Planet. Mordechay never allows us to look at any one thing; chaos and tumult reign”. Using ink, acrylic, wire and paper, Mordechay creates a chaotic installation through cutting and reassembling. For Spring/Break, Mordechay will create a sprawling site-specific work using drawings and three-dimensional paper pieces and cutouts.
With a profound debt to the world-building language of Dungeons & Dragons and the fantasy/science fiction genres, Jeffrey Beebe has been obsessively drawing and writing out his world of Refractoria—a comprehensive imagino-ordinary world that is equal parts autobiography and pure fantasy—for the last fifteen years. He lives a cloistered, studio-bound life fixating on the creation of his monomaniacal maps, diagrams, genealogical charts, portraits, and other pseudo-archival ephemera. Creating parallel universes filled with fantastical characters, unusual beasts, and alternative terrains, Beebe repackages the past and contextualizes a life. I intend to exhibit Beebe’s large-scale work on paper, Battle of the Invoke. The piece measures 94” x 44”. This work incorporates a great deal of his private life, including relationships with friends and loved ones, musical interests, and dating nightmares–to name a few–as well as common strange encounters that we all experience every day.
Whereas both Mordechay and Beebe give a nod to the work of Hieronymus Bosch, and depict a strange epic journey, Amanda Mathis’ work is an exploration of thoughts on dwelling and personal narrative. She explores notions of home and memory through the use of architectural imagery, and salvaged materials. Her work evokes a home that has been unearthed, picked apart, spliced together or turned upside down. Blurring the boundaries, her works at once appear comforting, familiar and domestic and on the other hand disconcerting and warped. Is the home a place you really want to be? For her site-specific installations, she will use salvaged carpets, wallpaper remnants, bits of molding and furniture. I would also like to include a small selection of 4-5 of her disconcerting and disorienting collages.
Foreignness and familiarity are common themes in the work. They dissolve into each other. Mordechay, Beebe and Mathis have been driven off course; they have reached the island of Calypso but can’t seem to make it back to the shores of Ithaca.
Where Eagles Dare
A Two Person Exhibition: Frank Lentini & Amanda C. Mathis
Curated by Fran Holstrom, in collaboration with Aquarius Studios in Ridgewood, Queens
July 16 – 30, 2017
Aquarius proudly presents Where Eagles Dare, a two-person gallery exhibition, in collaboration with Neesh Interactive. This exhibition features two artists with radically different approaches to materials, each beckoning the viewer to consider gravity, as well as the history and sequence of their material application. This show was produced by the curator and founder of Neesh, Fran Holstrom, in conjunction with a fundraiser with original artwork donated by Neesh artists and artists from the community.
Photos courtesy of Fran Holstrom.
The Freedman Gallery at Albright College
Interrogations, Interventions, and Modifications: Four Artists Employ Architectural Strategies
Curated by Erin Riley-Lopez
September 20 – November 11, 2012
This past spring and summer four artists from New York City—Sonya Blesofsky, Tracey Goodman, Amanda C. Mathis and Alison Owen—came to Albright College for site-visits that would form the basis for the site-specific installations that are a part of this Freedman Gallery fall exhibition.
Based on those site-visits, as well as their own research, the artists created installations specifically tailored to the Freedman Gallery, the Albright College campus, and the larger Reading community. Using materials as varied as vellum, glue, graphite, fabric, concrete, plaster, stone, paint, clementines, frames, vitrines, pedestals, moving blankets, glass, house paint, thread, nails, and photographs, the works on view in this exhibition use architecture, whether residential or gallery, as a means of exploring space.
Blesofsky interrogates structures by replicating specific architectural elements of the iconic White Chapel building on the Albright College campus—the archway, the eaves and the clock tower—in vellum and graphite drawing, and strategically places them in various locations throughout the gallery.
Goodman intervenes in the gallery by embedding concrete steps and clementines in the walls while also installing skirts of floating orange fabric.
Mathis modifies a home in Reading revealing layers of materials such as paint, wallpaper, paneling and various types of flooring.
Owen uses everyday objects that she found in the Freedman Gallery, such as packing blankets and vitrines, to reconfigure standard museum display strategies.
Also pictured, wall drawing by Sonya Blesofsky. Photos courtesy of The Freedman Gallery.