Elements

October 2 – October 21, 2018 

Featuring Elise Adibi & Andrew Shirley

Using materials derived from fire, plants, minerals, and animals, Elise Adibi and Andrew Shirley incite elemental transformations that reveal connections between the body, art, and environment. Works by both artists suggest the ways in which viewers are linked to their surroundings through shared physical properties, and to the past through common rituals. 

Alternately charred and infused with smoke, Shirley’s found object sculptures and works on paper bear traces of the communal rite of gathering around a fire. Moving between figuration and abstraction, his practice reflects the profound effect of place on identity. Made in a remote area of Northern Maine where his family has convened for generations, Shirley envisions his work as a conduit for communication with a still living history. 

To create four never before exhibited large format paintings on view here, Adibi began with the woven grid inherent to the canvas. Those lines grew into spirals and curves, evoking ocean currents or particle waves. Painting with organic essential oils, pigments, and human urine, Adibi explores the material affinities between bodies, plants, and paintings, and the possibility of dialogue between them. Adibi intensifies that dialogue with The Outermost Painting: the presence of life sustains life, a longterm site-specific installation featuring a copper painting in the gallery’s adjacent outdoor sculpture garden. On view through the harvest season and surrounded by plants likely to die during winter's dormancy, the painting will respond to its environment in unpredictable ways. In conjunction with The Outermost Painting, Adibi invited Allegheny students and faculty to make their own oxidation compositions, also on display, which serve as a foundation for discussions within the community about cycles of life and decay that bind all living creatures.