Angell Gallery | exhibitions | Allison Freeman

East Gallery

Allison Freeman
Memorandum

July 22nd – August 21st
Opening reception Thursday July 22nd 6–9 PM

Vestibule 3 by Allison Freeman

ANGELL GALLERY is pleased to present the upcoming show in the East Gallery, Memorandum by Allison Freeman. This will be Allison’s first showing at Angell Gallery and will run from July 22 to August 21. An opening night reception will be held on Thursday, July 22 from 6 – 9pm.

In the traditional view, paintings were conceptually likened to windows. The artist was said to record what was hypothetically real, and didactically could be taken to be literal. In Allison Freeman’s new body of work, done while finishing her graduate degree at Yale University, a next-generation twist has been added to that idea: in her series of elevators located in the hallways or garages of office buildings, we are slyly denied the ability to infer what is or is not, or could be going on. The images she works with are in fact of an actual place, but have been painted in a richly post-impressionist manner in such a way as to make identification unlikely.

And in her “Document” series, in which she makes an oil painting by transcribing a bureaucratic form or a bill of sale, she adds a conceptual window to the idea of the surface of her paintings: we see the document once removed in the first-hand fact of the painting. This distancing tactic, in which the whole of her painters’ toolbox is engaged, brings clearly to mind the experiential gap between seeing and knowing; between presence and action, absence and mere awareness.

Beyond the elevators’ transitional movement, action and non-action are seemingly deemed to be in essence indistinguishable. In such a way as to bring our attention to the self-referential fact of this “reality”, our gaze is directed not to a scene or any activity, but the possibility of a place which could be anywhere; or non-existent, effectively an abstraction, much like the document pieces in their use of the shallow space and gridded structure of much geometric abstraction.

And while this interpretation may be strengthened by the artists’ rhetorical demonstration of technical prowess, we should also note the self-conscious nod in the direction of critical theory, in the subtle menace of the putative business offices or private bedrooms these elevators may bring us to; or in what seems like the innocuous content of the documents. The insight this ironic, tongue-in-cheek literalism programs into the work is that in rendering what she calls “a transitional space of entrances and exits, but never a destination”, alongside the paintings they inhabit, Freeman’s elevators and documents become ciphers standing for an interpretation of art; for the uncertainty of subjectivity, and the strange, hidden beauty of our quotidian lives.

A recent MFA graduate at Yale University, Allison’s work has been exhibited in Toronto, Montreal, and at a recent MFA exhibition in New Haven, CT. Her work has been reviewed in the Concordia Journal, the Yale Daily News, and in the Globe and Mail by esteemed art critic Gary Michael Dault.