Allison Reimold, “One Need Not be a House to be Haunted”
July 16th – August 14th, 2022
Haven Gallery is honored to present Los Angeles based artist Allison Reimold for her first solo exhibition, entitled “One Need Not be a House to be Haunted” at the gallery. “One Need Not be a House to be Haunted” features nine paintings and three drawings that examine the many layers of the human condition through the lens of old master works and transfigured through the artist’s eye-catching use of color, light and surrealistic play on astral navigation. Laws of science pay no mind as luminosity, viscera, history and the metaphysical all coalesce in Reimold’s vivid compositions. Life is painted in layers of emotion and transcends space and time. The past is suggested through historical art references and ghostly phenomenons. The artists mostly autobiographical sitters remain in the corporeal present while what is to come finds itself expressed through the overall narrative. By means of surrealistic tendencies, planes of existence commingle and co-exist, bringing our thoughts, emotions and experiences to the surface. Life and happiness are held up by the buttresses of death and sorrow. These dualities of being are always with us and it is through the acknowledgment of the darkness that we shine the brightest. Artist Statement This show explores fantasies of a divided self: beautiful bodies who persist at the boundary between good and evil, light and dark, the earthly and ethereal worlds. Inspired by the female subjects of medieval art, the Flemish primitives, Biblical narrative, and modern literature, every figure finds herself in some state of opposition— a woman who is as she is painted, but who also plays host to her own creaturely others. Each will conquer and cradle, suffer and embrace, these externalized phantoms of her innermost conflicts. They give form to the poet Emily Dickinson’s adage that “one need not need a chamber/to be haunted.” These are the ghosts of the self behind the self.
