A multi-generational group exhibit at the Art Alliance, Re Focus centers on presenting the personal historic mythologies of seven artists who probe the human condition through singular images and hand-made process.

Mary Carlson’s miniature ceramic figures are often derived from Renaissance and medieval painting sources. The small scale of her sculptures and sensitive glazes gives them an intimacy that belies their power. Karen Kilimnik’s witty, wan and whimsical brushed paintings are characterized by a thrift shop Rococo sensibility, blending Old Masters with pastiches of photographs and magazine cuttings. The combination creates a contemporary fantasy world of glimmering delight. For over seven decades, June Leaf has explored a visionary and carnivalesque realm of human figures in photographs, narrative drawings, and paintings and hand-made, kinetic sculpture, all depicted in a state of active metamorphic flux. Often working simultaneously on paper, canvas, and metal, Leaf has invented an extensive personal canon of symbols and archetypes. Ellen Lesperance often references the labor traditions and heritage of women working in fiber in both actual hand-knitted works and schematic paintings related to Bauhaus fabrics, Pattern and Decoration painting and the body. Her clay Tanagra figures pay homage to Amazons, and contemporary feminist activists such as Yevgenia Isayeva, Pussy Riot and Pipilotti Rist. Helen O’Leary’s mysterious ramshackle assemblages are cobbled together amalgams of support and subsistence. Her reconfigured armatures created from found wood, are stuccoed over with applications of hand-made paints, revealing their histories and transcendental qualities like minimalist arte povera icons. Liliana Porter often uses toys or decorative figurines in installations and photographs whose interactions insinuate dark foibles of power. In these documents, she elegantly balances chaos with the need for order. Ani Tiscornia’s recent constructions refer to deconstructed architecture and ruins, implicating destruction by political upheavals. Installed upon the wall, they are stark and timely evocations of this pandemonium and repair, disaster and despair. Taken together, the works of these seven artists provide a compelling visual chronicle of the enormous strengths and subtle sensitivities of women working today.

Curator: Sid Sachs