The Gallery at the Summit Hotel is pleased to announce Michael Stillion · Alicia Little, an exhibition organized by Alternate Projects featuring paintings by Michael Stillion and an installation and video by Alicia Little.
Michael Stillion’s 13 paintings range in size from 90 inches high x 72 inches wide to 24 inches high x 30 inches wide. These highly energetic paintings are a mixture of abstraction and representation. Caught in perpetual motion, colorful expressionistic brush strokes are painted in and around distinct imagery- soles of work boots, arms with gloved hands, rimmed hats, balls. This imagery repeats from one canvas to the next and although appearing random, its placement reads like a narrative. On Human Noise, Stillion writes:
A movement is taking place that carries echoes of humanistic qualities. Working with imagery that teeters on cartoonish the subject is allowed to contort without concern. This freedom permits the figure to find its harmony within its invented environment.
Alicia Little’s installation is situated outside and in a cavernous corner space in the gallery. Looking like a minimalist painting, the piece is made with blue and yellow pieces of carpet, a web search screen shot image printed on cotton, a web search screen shot image printed on velvet, beige Softalk, beige plastic shoehorns, a purple inflatable pillow, pink silicone, a blue dust mop head, and paint. The use of these common materials lends an air of playfulness to the piece and offers new ways of experiencing the architectural space. Similar meanings develop in Little's video, Touchless Threshold. Here, common materials, like those seen in the installation, are utilized in mundane repetitive actions that leave the viewer transfixed with the expectation that something will change. Little states:
In videos, I create performative still lives using a solid colored backdrop, my hand, and found objects. Shot in a manner reminiscent of editorial videos, I perform mundane and repetitive actions, like stacking rocks or cutting a plant, in a manner that is reminiscent of domestic and factory labor. Objects in the videos overflow or are depleted, arranged and re- arranged, always having a cause and effect relationship with my hand. These videos get projected in relation to objects and installations, becoming proposed architectural spaces of their own.
Michael Stillion resides in Westwood, OH and is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Miami University where he teaches painting and drawing. Alicia Little resides in Northern KY and is currently teaching in the School of Art at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Art, Architecture, and Planning.
There will be a holiday reception for this exhibition on Saturday December 15 from 5 to 8 PM. The reception is free and open to the public and both artists will be in attendance. Michael Stillion · Alicia Little runs through January 31.