Valley House is honored to present our third solo exhibition of paintings by Allison Gildersleeve. Brooklyn-based painter Allison Gildersleeve spent her youth in rural Connecticut, where she returned during the early days of the pandemic. She earned her BA from the College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia in 1992, and her MFA in 2006 from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.
About the paintings in this exhibition, Allison Gildersleeve writes:
“Like the stage hands that dress the set between acts in a play, I employ layered saturated colors, flattened textures, and chaotic brush work in service of painted worlds that set the stage for action. These scenes of disjointed interiors and chaotic landscapes are devoid of actors, but the detritus left in the wake of their presence compresses generations of interstitial moments from past and present, all cast in the shadow of the New England harbour town my family has inhabited since the early 1900’s.
When the pandemic exploded in New York City, my husband, children and I returned to the town of my roots. For the past year, I have been living inside what I have been painting from afar. In these months of quiet, as I’ve walked the cobweb of streets past the saltbox houses and the cupolaed victorians, down past the stone cemetery gates on route to the fishing docks, I’ve felt the parallel presence of the daily lives, dramatic or mundane, that existed here before my time.
While my paintings were once confined to my own personal timeline, now the imagined histories of other lives that date back centuries have seeped into my paintings. The task of pressing multiple timelines; whether imagined, current, historical, or cyclical, into one singular composition has almost become as unwieldy and chaotic as the topographies I paint. These fractured interiors and tumbling landscapes are rendered not with an eye toward realism but as a way to collapse the narrative of a specific place and the layers of lives lived before… including my own.”
Valley House Gallery & Sculpture Garden
6616 Spring Valley Road, Dallas, Texas 75254
972-239-2441
https://www.valleyhouse.com
Open Monday-Saturday, 10:00am-5:00pm
Masks required
