Fuller Rosen Gallery is pleased to announce Held Tight, a two-person exhibition of new and recent work by Molly Alloy and Arielle Zamora on view June 04 – August 07, 2022. Held Tight will present ten paintings on panel by Arielle Zamora and a series of assemblages, sculptures, and installations by Molly Alloy.
Arielle Zamora’s work uses layers of paint and joint compound as an exploration of line and form. Her paintings in Held Tight are made with a unique and intricate process resulting in discrete geometric compositions. Each painting begins with layers of tinted joint compound on a panel. Once dry, the compound is sanded and carved using etching or dental tools. She fills the lines with a thin wash of oil paint and uses a razor blade to scrape the surface and reveals the filled line. Alternately, she applies washes of oil paint onto the substrate and carves into the joint compound, unearthing the tinted ground beneath it.
Zamora is intensely drawn to relationships between line and form, specifically from architecture and its surroundings to help assign structure, repetition and function to the two dimensional plane. Her latest series of paintings for Held Tight were made during the forming and traveling of the Russian convoy en route to Kyiv, Ukraine, preceding the current Russian invasion. News broadcasts of satellite imagery involving Russian military convoys and tanks carving new formations into the Ukrainian countryside have become visual specters for Zamora. Mapping out her own formations as retaliation to the Russian war machine which seeks to intimidate and ruin, her compositions entreat tranquility and harmony.
Molly Alloy’s practice operates as a space for healing and deepening connections to the natural world and their own queer, genderless identity. Alloy’s sculptures claim driftwood and leather as remnants of ancestral presence which they shape into material contemplations of collective queer immortality. Driftwood and leather share a common state of suspension as both mediums oscillate between life and death.
Alloy’s decelerated studio process begins with visits to the coastlines and estuaries of the Pacific Northwest to collect driftwood. As resonant objects, Alloy responds to the driftwood as bodies that once held life, and as reflectors of their own positions and experience. The driftwood pieces are each an individual character, whom Alloy gets to know slowly over time. The leather treatment given to the driftwood further personify each piece as wearer of garments or recipients of adornment; queers putting on looks to flag friends and resist assimilation. Each sculpture signals a different usage, orientation, or background corresponding to its individualized embellishments.
Abstracted into minimalist forms, Alloy and Zamora’s work in Held Tight mirrors the respect and curiosity both artists have for the organic architecture of the natural world. Their recognition of the slow processes of healing, caretaking and rebirth result in intuitive, attuned configurations in painting and sculpture.