John and June Allcott Gallery: Eva Wylie, Obstructed View

Opening and Gallery Talk: August 30, 5:30-6:30 pm
Refreshments will be provided. Masks are recommended.

Artist Statement: My current body of work aims to capture the movement, flow, light, and materiality of our ever shifting environment. These works are produced by printing on translucent silk that is then stretched over painted frames to create delicate yet densely stratified pieces that float on the wall. In some instances, I also print directly on the wall, covering one end of the gallery with a large piece designed to be painted over and hence entombed in the space upon the show’s closure. These paradoxically compressed yet airy surfaces–translucent silks and a temporary wall installation–engage and question the viewer’s sense of gravity and known parameters.

Extracted from remnants, screenshots, and memories linked to a combination of disparate times, places, and viewpoints, the imagery featured in this series frames our everyday lives as an experience to be understood in perpetual flux. The imagery is based on photographs I took of South Kensington, my rapidly changing neighborhood in Philadelphia, PA, in addition to personal notations from my sketchbook. I have been attracted to moments of abstraction that read as distortion and speak to our clunky, surreal, and sometimes overly programmed and digitally rendered lives. Pictorial signs recede, stain, and are reconfigured through processes ranging from the improvisational to technical, shifting in meaning as their mode of production changes. The medium of screen-printing itself allows for repetitive mark making, layering, and straining images into fine photographic halftones, tonal blends, or gestural stencils.

By layering and trapping these images within frames and across a large wall space, I create conversations between nature and artifice, the organic and the synthetic, and the present and the past. Celebrating transience and perishability, I make ephemeral work that self-reflexively underscores its own temporary nature; put otherwise- it too will recede into oblivion as soon as it is replaced by the gallery’s next show, only after first shape-shifting with the sun or being distorted by the afterimage of a really hot day.

Artist bio: Eva Wylie holds an MFA in Printmaking from Tyler School of Art and is the recipient of a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant. She has exhibited at Gallery Joe, Philadelphia, PA; Indiana University, Bloomington, IN; Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, PA; Fleisher Art Memorial, Philadelphia, PA; Spacecamp, Baltimore, MD and, recently at Locust Projects, Miami, FL. Wylie has held residencies at Atlantic Center for the Arts, New Smyrna Beach, FL; University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN; Graff Ateliers, Montreal, Canada; and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, Maine. Wylie currently teaches Printmaking at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD, and is a founding board member of Second State Press in Philadelphia, PA. A unique graphic dance that juxtaposes organic and synthetic imagery, her work features a signature iconography that intimates how humanity and its detritus merge in both familiar and unexpected encounters.