Allison Gildersleeve
Allison Gildersleeve makes colorful, densely layered works on canvas and paper that act as portraits of places she frequents.
Including wooded areas, home interiors, open highways, and back-country roads, the subjects of Gildersleeve’s compositions are all taken from everyday scenes of rural America, and those of her own upbringing. Gildersleeve breaks up her landscapes into their elemental parts: shapes, line, and fields of color, collaging them back together to create an affective scene rather than a visually accurate depiction. To her, how space is experienced, especially repeatedly over time, is more important than how it looks. In her works, potted plants, creeping vines, stairwells, dining tables, and other trappings of domestic and natural space intertwine to create a sense of memory, dreamscapes, and overlapping temporalities coming to life in the mind of the artist. For Gildersleeve, this “is the challenge: depicting the fixed as fluid, the static as varied, and the mundane as that which is anything but.”
Brooklyn, NY
Born 1970, New London, CT.
2005 MFA Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
1992 BA College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA