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| 312-944-4340 |
June 1, 2007
For Immediate Release
Contact: John Brunetti, Director
312.944.4340
john@alfedenagallery.com
Lisa Boumstein-Smalley’s Braille-like Drawings of Nature’s Violent Beauty
On view in Calamity
Alfedena Gallery, June 15 – July 28, 2007
Chicago --- Alfedena Gallery is pleased to present the first solo show of Lisa Boumstein-Smalley’s work, Calamity, from June 15-July 28, 2007. There will be a reception for the artist on Friday, June 15, from 5-8 p.m. The exhibition is free and open to the public.
Since 2004, Lisa Boumstein-Smalley has established herself as one of Chicago’s premier emerging artists through her ambitious and obsessive, large scale drawings that deconstruct the idealization of nature. Drawn on transparent and frosted Plexiglas, Boumstein-Smalley’s works are as much a commentary on the nature of image-making and reading visual symbols as they are about the iconic images of natural and man-made destruction she chooses as her subjects. Made with the pointillist precision allowed by the fine tips of her enamel paint markers, the surfaces of her predominantly white on white drawings are ephemeral skins, meant more to be sensed through the fingertips rather than through sight. It is this delicacy when juxtaposed with the violent nature of her motifs --- a tsunami wave, a forest fire, an iceberg --- that lends her work its disquieting aura.
At the core of her work is the challenge it presents to the viewer to detect the fugitive image that flirts with recognition. The black sheen of S.S. Iceberg, 2006, recalls the quiet danger that loomed out of sight in the still waters on the North Atlantic on the fateful night the Titanic sank. But contemporary, manmade disasters involving culture’s layered relationship to the natural world also preoccupy her current works. In Giant Bamyan Buddha, 2007, the cave-like image of gaping nothingness references the destruction by the Taliban in 2001 of centuries old monumental Buddha’s carved into the sandstone cliffs of central in Afghanistan. Boumstein-Smalley asks the viewer to question where true belief lies when one is confronted with the terrific forces that scatter our most precious icons into the wind --- a provocative metaphor in a post-911 world.
Born in Chicago in 1976, Lisa Boumstein-Smalley was raised in Omaha, Nebraska. She retuned to Chicago to earn a BFA, 2001, and MFA, 2003, from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and continues to live and work in the city. Since 1998 she has been in over twenty group shows including the critically received Strange Fictions at NIU Gallery, Chicago, and the Tarble Arts Center at Eastern Illinois University, The Allegorical Landscape at the Evanston Art Center, and The New Collusion curated by Hixson/Dillon for the Contemporary Arts Council Tenth Anniversary Exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center. In 2005 she was a nominee for an emerging artist grant from the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation.
Alfedena Gallery is located at 434 W. Ontario in Chicago. Gallery hours: Tuesday –Friday 12-8 pm; Saturday 10 am-5pm; Monday by appointment. For more information contact gallery director John Brunetti, 312.944.4340, john@alfedenagallery.com. For images of the exhibition visit the gallery website at www.alfedenagallery.com.