Maddison Colvin and Lillian Almeida at Slightly Cafe
Dead Loss
Works by Maddison Colvin and Lillian Almeida
March 31st – April 26th, 2018
Opening reception, Saturday March 31st
Slightly Cafe
545 East 8th Ave, Eugene, OR
Dead Loss (noun): 1) a venture or situation that produces no profit whatsoever 2) a person or thing that is completely useless.
These works by Maddison Colvin and Lillian Almeida converse about ideas of futility and success. Is isolating a living thing for study or an artistic gesture for display a dead loss venture from the beginning? Is attempting to maintain such a thing’s essence (or capture its momentary expression) an automatic exercise in futility? Conversely, perhaps dead loss is an impossibility: every failure may produce objects or events worthy of consideration. At life junctures when other ways of moving forward artistically were not available, both artists experienced compulsive, subconsciously driven relationships with materials at hand, leading to these bodies of work.
Maddison Colvin’s photographs are created by making high-resolution scans of portions of her garden at night. Using a modified scanner, she methodically documented areas of vegetation, destroying them in the process. The resulting works are failed attempts to capture and communicate a living space, the violently imposed glass of the scanner bed crushing the vegetation as it attempts to document and preserve. Despite scanning’s apparent objectivity, the captured images are difficult to read; receding from distorted compression to a dark, atmospheric haze. The attempt to see, to own, to record, is resisted and made illegible.
Lillian Almeida’s sculptures are created with latex paint, wood glue, wire, nylon fabric leavings, carpet remnants and ink marker transfer. They are born out of a comforting habit of peeling dried paint spills from plastic drop cloths, and a recent affinity with things folded and crumpled. In a zone between her practiced ability to control materials and vulnerable happenstance, this work emerges as a blunt avenue to self-awareness through visual metaphor: paint uncontained by an imposed structure offers the artist a place to consider and express variations of her own attempts at balancing the uncontrollable with frameworks of thought and organization. Continuing to dry and respond to gravity over time, these pieces also suggest our ephemeral nature – as they change shape, become more delicate, and even crumble.
Find Lillian Almeida online:
http://www.tavee.us/AlmeidaStudio/Lillian_Almeida.html
Find Maddison Colvin online:
