ALLISON GILDERSLEEVE BIOGRAPHY
Allison Gildersleeve’s work picks apart and reassembles the familiar, using the variability of memory as her guide. As she puts the pieces together, her work skips through time at an erratic pace, shuffling the monumental with the mundane and twisting landscapes and interiors into compositional mazes. Gildersleeve uses saturated color punctured by black and white passages and thick gestures over scraped surfaces. She offsets these visual contradictions with the simplicity of graphic silhouettes to describe the opposing forces in her paintings: presence and absence, implode and explode, hide and seek.
As her practice, Gildersleeve keeps a sketchbook of ink drawings where she reduces her surroundings into a simple iconography. This becomes an alphabet that she uses to compose her paintings. Each object becomes a stand-in for a time or place, and when they meet on the canvas, they pull together disparate experiences into one compressed timeline. There’s a narrative overload to Gildersleeve’s work in that each layer carries the immediacy of a moment in real-time, whether it happened an hour or a decade ago.
Allison Gildersleeve received her MFA from Bard College in 2004 and her BA from the College of William and Mary in 1992. Gildersleeve has exhibited widely across the United States and abroad. Notable solo exhibitions include Duck Creek Arts Center (East Hampton, NY), Asya Geisberg Gallery (New York, NY), Auxiliary Projects (Brooklyn, NY), Robischon Gallery (Denver, CO), Cynthia Reeves (Walpole, NH), Valley House Gallery (Dallas, TX), The George Gallery (Charleston, SC) Galleri Andersson/Sandstrom (Stockholm, SE) and Olle Nymans Ateljeer (Stockholm, SE). Selected group exhibitions include Eric Firestone Gallery (East Hampton, NY), Orwells Garden (Brooklyn, NY), Sarah Shephard Gallery (Larkspur, CA), Platform Project Space (Brooklyn, NY), Bienvenue Steinberg & J (New York, NY) Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art (NY), CRG Gallery (New York, NY), PS122 (New York, NY), Sharon Arts Center (Peterborough, NH), Dunkers Kulturhus (Helsingberg, SE) and Gana Art Space (Seoul, Korea). Gildersleeve was a 2018-2019 recipient of The Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program in Brooklyn, NY. She has been twice awarded the NYFA Fellowship in Painting. She has been an artist resident at Yaddo, the Millay Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, the Liquitex International Research Residency in London, the Norman Bird Sanctuary in Newport, RI, and the Pouch Cove Foundation in Newfoundland, Canada. Gildersleeve lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
