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Mud Season
Amy TallutoOctober 21 - December 3, 2005
Opening reception Friday, October 21, 2005, 6-9pm
CHICAGO, IL -- rowlandcontemporary is excited to present the solo debut exhibition of New York based artist Amy Talluto. Talluto's new paintings and ink drawings investigate the landscape through intense psychological narratives that employ both formal and painterly devices.
Amy Talluto's new work, Mud Season, presents a group of paintings that are at once ambiguous and familiar. Dense forests, fertile woodlands and inhospitable swamplands tempt, but through Talluto's masterful use of brushstrokes, and her juxtaposition of flat areas of paint and fully realized rendering, she creates a sense that something else is at play.
What's at play here is nature in all its glory. Beauty, fantasy, mystery, anxiety, and even the sinister - all draw on notions that vacillate between representation and abstraction. Talluto's depiction of twisting and thrashing tree limbs, insects and animals are rendered through her candy-colored visages to create a sense of magic and fantasy.
In Waterfall (2005), Talluto works within the margins of abstraction to transform a familiar scenic view into a chaotic paradise. Luscious strokes of pink paint cascade down into lemon-lime streams straddled by a single blue-ish fallen tree trunk, all building a sense of narrative. Her methodology elicits an emotional response from the viewer; here nothing is just what it seems.
Talluto's suite of ink drawings are distinguished by their reliance on abstracted marks paired with a deep depiction of space. These black and white works transform ordinary views into lyrical and melancholy formal meditations on landscape.
Amy Talluto is an artist fascinated with nature. She has taken the role of the landscape and shifted the focus towards a new dynamic. Rich and colorful, layered and textured, her paintings and drawings reveal everyday anxieties as well as a romantic notion that is open to discovery.
Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, Amy Talluto currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her BFA from Washington University, St. Louis, MO, in 1995, and her MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, NY in 2001. In 2005, Talluto held a residency at the Vermont Studio Center. Her work has been included in exhibitions at Naked Duck Gallery (New York, NY), and the Dieu Donné Papermill (New York, NY).
