The art of Alison Weld confronts the paradoxes of the private and collective nature of identity. Her individual works embody confrontation through the forced conjoining of personal painterly mark and anonymous fabric design. This juxtaposition of expressive gesture and commercially designed pattern sets in motion a spirited interplay of visual languages and cultural meanings through which both artist and audience find voice.

Alison Weld’s thick strokes of paint….document  the process of painting and love their own physicality.

Ms. Weld lives in Jersey City, NJ  

Seeking to express a sense of my whole self as an individual living in a multi-cultural urban environment, I have been juxtaposing panels of popular fabric with my imagery for the past eight years. The anonymous and impersonal patterns of the fabrics are butted against the personal metaphors and abstract images of the paintings. Their wedding speaks of the feminine, the practical and the popular. Each part provides a bridge to different realms. The visual languages of our mass culture provide a broader social context for the paintings’ more personal statements, while the paintings bring the popular culture sensibility into another aesthetic realm. 

I’ve been painting for twenty-five years, working in an abstract, gestural, expressionistic tradition that has allowed me room to resolve paintings in a variety of ways. I begin without a preconceived plan and work with only general ideas for the painting. My intent for the painting evolves as I paint. I believe color and mark to be the equivalents of letters and words, and the meaning arises by my working with its visual elements. I’ll paint with palette knives, brushes, rags, or oil sticks. While most of the time I cover the entire canvas thickly with paint in a long process of discovering the image, I occasionally approach a canvas as if it were a piece of paper and maintain a white ground. I sometimes take up to six months to complete a work, giving the surface a history and consciousness that I find especially significant. My white ground works are spare and are involved less with surface history and more with creating imagery from an array of marks.

Currently, I employ several visual strategies to create works that speak of my experiences and interests in both the natural world and the urban culture of which I am a part. I start with an abstract imagery imbued with a psychological presence and physical import. That imagery ranges from abstract mark scapes to more figurative forms suggestive of underlying life forces that may seem part human or animal and part floral or vegetal. Often painted with visceral emotion, these forms appear as symbols for body parts and carnal energy, sometimes presented as people or animals joined as couples in a portrait. Upon first arriving in New York City as a young artist, I was employed as an assistant in a paleontology lab, and the experience of working with fossil turtles and dinosaurs has stayed with me informing my interests in natural time and consciousness. Ultimately, I seek to give the paintings a presence that offers a suggestive viewing experience and provides analogies for states of being.

Just as my work evolves over a long period of creation, I intend to give the viewer a rich experience that can be absorbed slowly.

Alison Weld
December 2002
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Alison Weld recent paintings

January 9 – February 8, 2003

As a young abstract painter in her mid twenties, Alison Weld moved to
New York City in 1979 after receiving her MFA in painting from the School of the
Art Institute of Chicago. Her work expresses a sense of her whole self as an individual living in a multi-cultural urban environment. For the past eight years she has been juxtaposing panels of popular fabric with imagery – each part providing a bridge to different realms.
The visual languages of our mass culture provide a broader social context for her paintings’ more personal statements, while the paintings bring the popular culture sensibility into another aesthetic realm. The anonymous and impersonal patterns of the fabrics are butted against the personal metaphors and abstract images of the paintings. Color and mark, surface and space, proportion and scale are important elements of her work.
Ms. Weld, a Jersey City resident, has had her work exhibited in New York at Pacifico Fine Arts, Anita Shapolsky Gallery, Susan Schreiber Gallery, Trans Hudson Gallery, Luise Ross Gallery and the Robert Steele Gallery.


For further information and images contact: Robert Steele or Marina Barry
Robert Steele Gallery 
511 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001 
Ph. 212.243.0165
www.robertsteelegallery.com

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The New York Times, Sunday, October 13, 2002

Art Review

More is More: Repetition Adds Dimension to Patterns
Alison Weld

By Helen A. Harrison

Molloy College Art Gallery

...Ms. Weld's series of diptychs and triptychs incorporates panels of sick manufactured materials butted up against thickly impastoed canvases. Fake fur, ersatz leather, embroidered fabric and animal hide patterns vie for attention with densely sculptured swirls of pigment. These juxtapositions, which the artist describes as "simultaneously sincere yet ironic" are intended to challenge conventional notions of abstraction. The uninflected bright yellow filaments that cover the right panel of "Teeo Teeo" are far removed from real fur, their counterpart in nature. In the left panel, with its visceral clumps of paint struggling to emerge from a welter of competing strokes and shapes, references to an external subject are oblique. Yet both parts are related in their fundamentally abstract character. "The Anatomy of Sorrow" carries the metaphor farther, using figure-like images in the painted central panel to suggest a confrontational pairing of antagonists.

The irony of Ms. Weld's approach lies in the uneasy marriage of expressionistic and mass-produced abstraction. The former are deliberately subjective and hard to decipher; the latter are instantly recognizable and familiar. The result is a kind of intellectual game in which high and popular art compete on a playing field leveled by the artist. The conflict is most engaging when the colors do not quite harmonize as in "The Flood Plain of Desire" in which the purple velvet of the flanking panels grates against the softer blues and pinks of the central canvas.
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Alison Weld


Solo Exhibitions

2003 Robert Steele Gallery, New York, NY
1998 Hunterdon Museum of Art, Clinton, NJ
1997 Ernest Rubenstein Gallery, The Educational Alliance, New York,
NY 
1997 Aljira, A Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, NJ
1996 University of Bridgeport, Carlson Gallery, CT
1995 Works on Paper Trans Hudson Gallery, Jersey City, NJ
1989 Susan Schreiber Gallery, New York, NY
1988 Morris Museum, Morris, NJ
1988 E.L. Stark Gallery, New York, NY
1988 Coup de Grace Gallery, Hoboken, NJ

Selected Group Exhibitions

2002 Group Exhibition, Robert Steele Gallery, New York, NY
2001 Group Exhibition, Robert Steele Gallery, New York, NY
2000 Younger Artists, Anita Shapolsky Gallery, New York, NY
2000 Dog Days, Pacifico Fine Art, New York, NY 
1999 Subliminal View, Trans Hudson Gallery, New York, NY
1998 Young Artists, Anita Shapolsky Gallery, New York, NY
1997 The Whole World in a Small Painting, Trans Hudson Gallery, New York, NY
1997 The Graphic Proof: A Century of Print Collecting at the Newark
Public Library, The Newark Public Library, NJ
1996 Hot Art, Anita Shapolsky Gallery, New York, NY 
1995 Meta Material, Montclair State University Art Gallery, Montclair, NJ
1995 Explorations: Shades of Difference, University of Bridgeport,
Bernhard Arts & Humanities Center, CT
1995 Rutgers Center for Innovative Printmaking Fellowship Recipients, The Galleries, Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University 
1995 Exploring Undefined Boundaries, Montclair State University 
1994 1994 Cheekwood National Contemporary Painting Competition, Cheekwood Museum of Art, Nashville, Tennessee 
1994 Memory Revisited, Mercer County Community College Art
1994 Freedom--Discipline--Abstraction, Trans Hudson Gallery, Jersey City, NJ 
1994 Aljira, A Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, NJ
1992 Luise Ross Gallery, New York, NY
1992 In the Tradition, Part I, Anita Shapolsky Gallery, New York, NY
1990 Harms, Lane & Weld, Susan Schreiber Gallery, New York, NY
1988 Recent Painterly Paintings, Schreiber/Cutler Gallery, New York, NY
1988 New Painterly Abstraction, Jersey City Museum, New Jersey

Education

1977-1979 The School of the Art Institute of Chicago: M.F.A. in Painting
1971-1975 Alfred University, State University of New York: B.F.A.