LIZ ALDERMAN: PRETTY HAMMERS
The recently-launched The Old Bailey Gallery has invited New York City artist Liz Alderman to be its second Artist-In-Residence at its location in the Crestwood neighborhood of Birmingham, Alabama. The Old Bailey Gallery is an innovative new artist residency program and contemporary art gallery founded by Birmingham local Dan Bailey. Alderman’s residency will run alongside a solo exhibition of her bird paintings entitled “PRETTY HAMMERS.”
“PRETTY HAMMERS” features heavy-impasto mixed-media paintings of birds inspired by the "yellow hammer” woodpecker, the official state bird of Alabama.
LIZ ALDERMAN: FLOCKED
Birds are the visual subject matter of choice for artist Liz Alderman. Their shapes, colors and expressivity are the perfect fodder for the artist to exult in the materiality of paint.
FLOCKED features heavy-impasto paintings of eagles, finches, swallows and an albatross to which the artist has assigned names like Cokie, Ragnar, Irene and Phoebe. The artist creates an imaginative persona for each bird that develops over the course of each paintings’ creation. A bird may first appear in the painting process with a countenance of stoicism or despair only to flip into the quintessence of joy or even mania, as embodied through Alderman’s unpredictable and multifaceted painting techniques. Alderman’s bold gestrual brushwork can be sensuous and refined, or cartoonish and even violent.
The conflicting moods that Alderman’s birds emote are paralleled by conflicts of painterly style within each work. Each canvas is a frenetic arena of diverse painting techniques; paint is poured, then directed towards figuration with a brush, then smeared back into abstraction with a palette knife, then dissolved into drips that are further transformed into contour lines that describe feathers, beaks, waves or wings. Several of the bird paintings in FLOCKED contain entire tubes of paint, squeezed directly onto the canvas to delineate a horizon line, a talon, ship masts, sails or tree trunks.
The title of the show, FLOCKED, is a nod to the world of birds but is also a reference to the process of “flocking” fabric, a centuries-old technique of creating patterned surface textures on fabrics with adhesives. Alderman’s canvases are similarly flocked.
Prior to starting a painting Alderman glues items to the canvas arbitrarily without forethought or knowledge of what the final figure portrayed will be. Alderman’s canvases are “flocked” with elements like synthetic fur, shredded paper, crinolines, ripped stockings, lace and broken jewelry. Alderman’s aim is to make the painting process unpredictable by covering her work surface with roadblocks that her brush must work around, into, onto or over.
“Painting is like pin-ball,” says the artist, “I create a mezzo-rilievo surface using my trash, basically, then propel myself into the painting process and hope to keep to the ball in play, embracing accidents and inviting in the unknown. Eventually a bird emerges.”
To enhance the unpredictability of her painting process the artist mixes the slough of her own existence into her paint; riffraff such as the contents of her junk mail shredder, dryer lint or string from frayed clothes are all added to her paints to create a viscous stew that can be difficult to manipulate with grace or subtlety.
As a result of her technique, her paintings resemble ecstatically apocalyptic alien landscapes full of pools, ridges, ravines and rivulets that are especially apparently when observed from a raking angle.
The detritus flocked onto the surface and the inscrutable effluvium within her paint come together to coagulate into grotesque bas-reliefs than span figuration and abstraction.
Clearly influenced by Van Gogh, Soutine and Auerbach as well as contemporary Allison Schulnik, Alderman has doubled-down on the physical properties of paint in the age of AI in order to create a tactile circus of marks that is flirtatious, bizarre, theatrical and best experienced in person.
FLOCKED will run from JUNE 11 – OCTOBER 31, 2023
UPSTATE ART WEEKEND OPEN STUDIOS
Lexington Arts + Science is the epicenter of the avante-garde art mecca revitalization of our Catskills mountaintop hamlet of Lexington as a creative hub. July 22-August 7 2022 (open Fridays-Mondays, 10am-6pm) – LexArtSci is participating in Helen Toomer’s Upstate Art Weekend.
Artists-In-Residence Anthony Fatato and Liz Alderman will be hosting an open studio event but make sure to come to enjoy other activities like meditation programs and sound baths on the meadow, nature journaling. Guests are invited to explore Lexington and then head over to Prattsville Art Center for more dazzlement.
Lexington Arts + Science (LexArtSci) consists of approximately ten buildings of wide variety of uses and sizes spread across a 30+ acre campus, bounded on one side by the Schoharie Creek, on the other by Packsaddle Mountain, and bisected by New York State Route 42.
Although it is in the center of the hamlet of Lexington, in a commercial district, LexArtSci feels very wild – worlds distant from NYC (2.5 hours), Albany (1.5 hours), Hudson and Catskill (45 minutes). Just seven miles from Hunter and Windham ski resorts, the Towns of Windham, Hunter and Prattsville and a thirty minute drive from Woodstock, the hamlet has largely been protected from modern development patterns and is a treasure in and of itself.
ON WAVES
Liz Alderman, Kevin Dudley, Anna Ehrsam, Eric Feuer, Katherine Jackson, Patrick Meagher, Iliana Ortega, Dalila Pasotti, Pestypig
On Waves is a group show on the theme of motion, water, signals, and movement, curated by Silvershed, an artist-run project in downtown Manhattan that explores contemporary art values, ethics and aesthetics of the 21st century. Silvershed works through lateral discussion among a core team of organizers and advisors to collaborate on exhibitions, publications and events in New York, Los Angeles and Berlin.