NYAB Event - Allison Maletz “Game”

Allison Maletz “Game”

Calico

[Image: Allison Maletz "Boa Constrictor", (detail) (2014) watercolor on paper, 12 x 71 in.]

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Game is a series of watercolor paintings examining interspecies relationships that playfully celebrate hunter and prey / game and play. Life-sized paintings reveal creatures on display, mid narrative, against a bleak backdrop. While Maletz’ watercolors are bright and sometimes humorous, each displays moments when the medium overtakes the storyline - bleeding and soiling her subjects. As a result, her artworks evoke discomfort, allowing for the possibility that something grotesque is trying to surface. The incorporation of decorative patterns against stark white backgrounds creates a self referential portrait within the portrait, representing the cyclical effort to domesticate something that was once, and might again, be wild.

For nearly a decade Maletz has focused on the idea of the domestic, platonic - yet secretly dysfunctional - western family. The exploration drew Maletz to consider the family unit as a whole, including the domestication of wild animals and introduction of them into suburban and city homes. The theme of Game began when Maletz started painting headless walking life-sized dogs. These docile creatures represented the chaos of animals living in our homes.

Allison Maletz is a contemporary mixed media artist. She received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design where she began as a documentary style artist-photographer. For years she traveled throughout the world making photographs about being normal, yet misplaced. During her sojourn in London while completing her MFA at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, Maletz started making sound installations and large-scale watercolor paintings from photographs. This reinvented relationship to photography allowed her to further evolve concepts which questioned normality and what it means to “belong”.

Maletz is currently living and working in New York City, and has exhibited in the Liverpool Biennial, New Contemporaries UK, Zoo Art Italy, The Royal Watercolor Society in London, and the Moscow Biennale for Young Artists at the MMoMA. Her first New York solo show Together was at the Christopher Henry Gallery in 2013. Recently she has exhibited at Calico Brooklyn, the National Arts Club, the Denny Gallery, Fresh Window, NURTUREart, The Ugly Art Room, and the Florence Griswold Museum.