Alina Perez & Arel Lisette “Not Dark Yet”
Deli Gallery
This event has ended.
Alina Perez and Arel Lisette’s two-person show is a holding space. Oh, que Angustia la Mia, a drawing of an overgrown shed from Alina’s childhood backyard, functions as the subconscious double for every household’s drawer of cast-off items. These untidy repositories accumulate all the things we cannot seem to let go, kept in reserve for an unspecified future use. Butterfly Graveyard (A Very Hard Truth) recounts a visit to a butterfly sanctuary where Arel, crouched to the ground, discovered the wings of dismembered butterflies floating in a pool of murky water. Similar to Alina’s shed, this ominous sight stuck in her mind for years, with no obvious reason or meaning, until it took the form of this composition. Butterflies—one of several recurring visual motifs in this show—are signs of transition and transformation, death and disembodiment, and, ultimately, resurrection.
“Not Dark Yet,” Alina and Arel tell me, was born of revisiting the past. Memory is subjective and highly unstable, and when we return to its shadowy figures and forms, we cannot be sure of what they will have become in our absence and disregard. The act of remembering can also be acutely isolating; not everyone will agree on what transpired. For both artists, drawing is a way to parse through the kinds of complicated experiences that continue to ache after years, even decades. Like memories, drawings can be specters, too, containing moments where their subjects fall apart and are placed back together.
While Alina and Arel both work with charcoal and pastel, their processes are each other’s foil. Alina layers her marks gradually onto the blank surface, whereas Arel begins by saturating the paper completely, revealing light and shadow through erasure so that negative space itself becomes form. What information lies dormant as a drawing moves from emptiness to opacity? What parts of a drawing cannot be seen, held latent within the record of layering and erasing?
In the artists’ words, the twelve works that comprise this show are expressions of “personal hauntings and their resulting manifestations”—the ways that the past inevitably seeps into the present, whether you want it to or not. Within these dark perimeters, figures, objects, and symbols endure outside of time and place, suspended at the precipice of realization and transformation. Through drawing, they take on new lives that call to attention malignancies that are (and perhaps have always been) right there, just beneath the surface. What happens when we return to that edge? Do we fear it, or do we trust it?
Hope comes in many shades and can be hard to separate from despair, yet Alina and Arel hold that the dead of the past are still alive and, in their very unresolve, can help us understand who we were and what we might become: it is not dark yet, but it’s getting there.
-Isabel Flower, 2023
Arel Lisette (b. Riverside, California) is a visual artist working with charcoal and pastel to create drawings on paper. Arel received her BFA in Fine Art from the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at the George Washington University. She was awarded artist residencies to attend the Vermont Studio Center and the Alex Brown Foundation, and is a graduate of the Professional Printer Training Program at the Tamarind Institute of Lithography. Her work has been exhibited in the New Prints Program at the International Print Center of New York, and is included in the permanent collections of the City of Albuquerque and University of New Mexico.
Alina Perez (b. Miami, Florida) received her BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA in Painting and Printmaking at the Yale University of Art in New Haven. She was a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2017, and has attended residencies at the Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown, the OxBow School of Art in Michigan, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her work was recently exhibited at the Taubman Museum of Art, Virginia; Atlanta Contemporary, Georgia; Deli Gallery, New York; Arcadia Missa, London; Rachel Uffner, New York; and Company Gallery, New York.
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Schedule
from February 24, 2023 to March 25, 2023