Grids of brightly-colored encaustic paintings inspired by theory of Genetic Memory and Pennsylvania Dutch Folk Art

LJ Douglas: evo-devo

November 16– December 29, 2007

Chicago---Alfedena Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new work by painter

LJ Douglas, titled evo-devo, from November 16- December 29, 2007. This is the artist’s first solo show in Chicago since 2005, and her first at Alfedena Gallery.  A reception for the artist will be held on Friday, November 16, 5:00-8:00 p.m. The exhibition is free and open to the public.

Douglas employs the language of painting and drawing to address permeable botanical and biological divisions. She overlays imagery (culled from 18^th century naturalist prints, her own drawings from microscopy, computer manipulated photographs/prints/stencils) as a way to refer to the genetic memory inherent in everything and as visual reference to her childhood experience of peering into the frozen creek of her family’s home in the Pennsylvania Dutch country to see and understand a largely unseen world. Douglas’s love of flowers/plants nurtured by her childhood immersion in the landscape has directed her reading about genetics and the latest theory of evolutionary developmental biology, evo-devo, which suggests that the division between species is a porous membrane rather than a stiff boundary.

Encaustic, a mixture of wax and oil pigment, is Douglas’s signature medium used for both its symbolism and formal properties. Wax, historically, has played a significant role in enhancing and preserving the body. In Douglas’ work its skin-like surface becomes a metaphor and a surrogate for the body be it plant, animal or human. Encaustic’s malleability allows Douglas to use unusual tools for a painter – dental instruments, clay sculpting tools, cooking utensils – to incise her drawing directly into the panels that serve as supports for her works. This prosaic technique as well as her use of stencils as additional drawing tools references Douglas’s interest in the folk art tradition of the Pennsylvania Dutch culture of her youth. Through the study of the elaborate barn paintings of these German and Swiss immigrants, she “came to understand that the decorative was more than ornament, but another way to speak about the natural world.”

Douglas’s paintings, many of which are loosely scaled at five by five inches, are displayed in specific groupings, some in more formal grids, others in more asymmetrical arrangements, reflecting her interest in pattern and visual texture and its integration into pictorial structure. In creating her groupings it is important to her that they are not designed based on reoccurring motifs, color or design repetition. Rather, that each work within the grouping functions as an autonomous, unique work, while nonetheless being pictorially compatible with the other pieces. This approach is in part inspired by Douglas’s ten years of piano lessons that taught her to appreciate how individual moments can work together to make a unified whole. Therefore, each of the groupings functions in their own way as small, curated exhibitions. Through these glowing, intimate choreographies of wax, pigment, and drawing the viewer is taken on fluid journeys between microscopic and macroscopic worlds.

LJ Douglas was born in Sellersville, PA in 1948. She received an MFA in 1977 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BFA in 1975 from the Philadelphia College of Art. She has exhibited throughout the Midwest and her work has been reviewed in Art in America, the New Art Examiner, Dialogue and the Chicago Tribune. Her art is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art and the Fogg Art Museum. She lives and works in Bloomington, Illinois where her studio is located in an art deco era Coca-Cola bottling factory.

To view images of the exhibition visit the web site, www.alfedenagallery.com.

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