FUTURE LOVERS: ALISON COOLEY AND REVEAL: STEPHANIE WEBER AT THE PAGE BOND GALLERY FRIDAY, MARCH 3, 2017.
Page Bond Gallery is pleased to present Future Lovers: new work by Alison Cooley and Reveal: new paintings by Stephanie Weber opening Friday, March 3 from 6 to 8 PM. The exhibition will run March 3 to April 1, 2017.
Alison Cooley is a Washington, D.C. artist whose energetic paintings evoke ambient experiences, momentary encounters, and interpersonal connections. Inspired by the idea that all individuals emanate a unique aura or “personal climate,” her latest body of work captures the complex atmospheric entanglements that accompany our “daily, mostly anonymous interactions.” Cooley describes her paintings as “collective portraiture, capturing the shifting fronts and clouds of humans moving through and around each other, leaving elements in their wake.” She employs a variety of media and techniques—including watercolor, oil paint, colored pencils, and calligraphy pens—in order to explore a dynamic range of graphic possibilities. Sharp, whimsical lines traverse fields of saturated color and negative space, while pools of ink overlap matte graphite and translucent washes of paint. These diverse, Twombly-esque markings “express the range of ways we present ourselves to the world,” the artist explains; and they dance across her canvases in a way that echoes the transitory, fleeting nature of human encounters. Yet, while Cooley’s eloquent paintings touch on the thought-provoking nature of ephemerality in our contemporary world, they also exude a decidedly joyful, exciting energy that is ultimately both uplifting and positively contagious.
Cooley studied at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY and Corcoran School of the Arts and Design in Washington, D.C. Her paintings have been exhibited extensively nationally and in Canada and have been featured in numerous print and digital publications, including DC Modern Luxury and Domino Magazine. Her work is included in many public and private collections.
Bay Area artist Stephanie Weber bases her lush, prismatic paintings on the synergistic interplay of emotional resonance and intellectual rigor. Known for uniting structural logic with painterly abstraction, her compositions infuse distinct rectilinear bands and stripes with intense hues and unexpected textures. Weber currently works exclusively with acrylic and oil paint on honeycomb aluminum panels, creating an interesting contrast between the cool, industrial metal and the sensuous hand-mixed paint it carries. The aluminum substratum imparts a diaphanous shimmer to these paintings, coalescing with rich fields of color to suggest myriad textures—ranging from minerals to polished wood, crumpled paper to silky fabric, atmospheric clouds to iridescent stained glass. The works’ irresistibly tactile surfaces appeal to the senses of both sight and touch, at the same time as they evoke deeply personal and subjective associations. At once methodically structured and highly expressive, this body of paintings stimulates a thoughtful tension, in Weber’s words, between “the concrete and the intangible—what you can touch and what you can imagine.”
Weber received her BFA from University of California, Los Angeles, where she studied alongside Richard Diebenkorn, Nathan Oliveira, and other 1960s Bay Area figurative abstractionists. Weber has shown her work in several international art expos and gallery exhibitions across the United States, and has paintings in many permanent collections, including Smithsonian American Art Museum and Philadelphia Museum of Art. Among her impressive list of fellowships and awards are residencies from American Academy in Rome and Tamarin Institute in New Mexico.
