James Allen: "It was more than twenty-five years ago that the figure of a self-absorbed old woman pushing a shopping cart first appeared in one of my 'American Fold Tale' drawings. She kept coming back periodically in that series, and I began to think of her as 'the ancient shopper'. I finally realized that she wasn't (just) 'shopping', and that she could become the heart of a larger installation work--and that idea has generated the current paintings."
Buffalo Six, Isabelle Pelissier: A few years back, right before leaving Paris, I pinned on a gallery wall, frames of a silent movie (“i-movie), a sort of repertoire of objects, shapes, and colors which were a part of my everyday life.
Now, once again, I am about to leave a city, a place I have grown to love over the course of some six years. As I assemble my paintings of Buffalo, works that treat the recurring themes and unending variations of everyday life, often originating with one image, or a feeling, a juxtaposition of colors, a certain light, I find myself inhabiting a sort of visual organism. Its filamentous successions of frames, connected together by “nodes,” form “a series of series,” a snapshot of accumulated impressions, when connected to the everyday experience.
From street signs to details on construction sights, from gardens to scrap yards, from portraits to familiar metal tools, to collections of plastic bottle caps, from iced visions of Delaware Park in January, to signs of an encrypted language in highway gas stations, from hidden corners of the Tri-main building to bursting flowers or falling leaves, with the aerial visions of the Skyway over the lake bridging the elements together, the assemblage offers a field for personal access, for individual walks through Buffalo, like different journeys highlighted on a map.
The project joins serial compositions, as an open-ended method for exploring a limited range of source materials, to explorations of pattern in sculptural wall assemblage. The composition will take an organic shape, stretching itself across the four walls, and incorporating different series of painting, of different formats and supports-boards of slightly different thickness-to give the whole installation some relief. At the same time, the result will be homogenous thanks to a uniform painting style and consistent palette of colors.
The pleasures I hope to offer viewers will be my way, in some small manner, of thanking Buffalo for an inspiring and stimulating six years.