ALISON RASH & CHRIS TRUEMAN: THE SUSPEDED LITERAL
Alison Rash
Alison Rash's paintings and drawings juxtapose radically different motifs from the history of abstract art such as geometric patterns and gestural marks, formless illegibility and opaque inscriptions, linear elements and dynamic negative shapes. Psychological intuitions, systemicity and the meaning imbued in everyday objects serve as a jumping off point for her recombant compositions. Rash's open sensibility, both playful and rigorous, reminds us that genre based discourses like craft, geometricism and action painting are not necessarily mutually exclusive endeavors. Her specific form of abstract pictorialism negotiates an in-between space of webbed meanings and networked sources that not only demands time and contemplative reflection but also resists commodifying style at the cost of substance. The composed conviviality of her most recent body of work challenges us to rethink the presuppositions of automatic writing as an archetypal methodology - releasing us from defining the aesthetic unconscious in retrograde terms.
Alison Rash holds an MFA in Studio Art from Claremont Graduate University, an MA in Education from Pepperdine University Graduate School of Education and Psychology and a BA in Art from Pepperdine University. Her work was recently shown in Los Angeles, Tokyo and Milan. She was awarded the Walker/Parker Memorial Fellowship and Claremont Graduate University Fellowship and was a Dedalus Foundation Nominee. Rash lives and works in Los Angeles.
Chris Trueman
The works of Chris Trueman collide motifs from the history of abstract art with more contemporary forms of mark making. As a vivisection of gestural, architectonic and graphic elements Trueman's visual mash-up's present us with the irreducible feeling of serendipity and deja vu. The visual paradoxes in his work often consist of pushing deep space forward, adding a palpable sense of dimensionality to gestural marks and making accidents appear planned. These types of dialectic contradictions are informed by the presuppositions of modern and postmodern art while courting a type of hyper-self reflexivity that exceeds the conditions of twentieth century abstraction. We see this evidenced in Trueman's newest body of work which mixes the look of stencils, sprayed techniques and taped off passages with a reversible sense of figure/ground relations and somber color harmonies. Trueman has described this recent transformation in his work as issuing from the use of "equilibrium canceling diagonals", "slippery images" and "provisional" stratagems.
Chris Trueman graduated with an MFA from Claremont Graduate University in 2010. Recently his work was included in the exhibitions: "Speculative Materialism" at D-block Projects in Long Beach and "About Paint" at Carl Berg projects in LA. Trueman has also shown his work extensively in exhibitions at venues in San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego and Milan, Italy. While at CGU he was the recipient of the Ann Peppers Foundation Fellowship, a Claremont Graduate University Merit Fellowship Recipient and received the faculty recommended Dedalus Foundation Fellowship Nomination. Trueman’s work was included in the 2010 New American Paintings MFA edition (87).