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Indepth Arts News:
"Alyssa Pheobus : Dar al-"
2010-07-15 until 2010-08-28
Holster Projects
London, ,
Holster Projects announced today their first exhibition in their new Victoria space. The exhibition of new drawings by American artist Alyssa Pheobus titled: Dar al- will set the tone for the new venue and confirms Holster Projects continuing ethos of presenting exceptional intellectually stimulating works to a younger audience, that are just setting out into what can be a minefield in the area of art collecting. The gallery which was created in 2008, is a resource of international emerging to mid-career artists and prides itself on offering unique works by artists on the cusp of international recognition.
Dar al- will be the American, Yale and Columbia educated Pheobus’ debut exhibition in Europe and she will be offering her most recent works from 2009-2010, including a series in handmade paper, as well as a site-specific floor drawing.
Her new work juxtaposes devotional language with architectural allusions; this confluence of stark lines, cryptic texts and skeletal spatial structures marks the threshold of an unknown. Through a meticulous and meditative process of inscription onto large swaths of handmade paper, Pheobus’ practice dually evokes and subverts the legacy of the arts and crafts movement and the tradition of American folk art. A process of painstaking stitchwork is suggested by the artist’s intensive graphite marks, as each felt-like sheet of paper is reminiscent of the weight and texture of a band of textile.
Yet, tradition is undermined by the latent sense of violence and longing present in the severity of her linear forms, intermeshed with fragments of enigmatic language. This juxtaposition, of harsh line and inscrutable text, engages with the inherent binary of both power and desire that are historically inscribed within gender relations, the culture of craft and notions of domesticity.
With Comber and VOW from 2009, Pheobus formally departs from these elaborate graphite drawings to create large-scale works composed with stenciled linen pulp on black handmade paper. In Comber, Pheobus appropriates an esoteric fragment from a Sufi devotional poem, rhythmically repeating the spiritual text over the expanse of seven sheets of paper. Formally echoing the lyricism of these words, the text seems to ebb and flow, appear and disappear under each vertical strand. This very interconnection of language and form is also explored in VOW, whose letters have been dismembered and abstracted to form a cipher for the vexation underlying any oath of love and desire.
Rendered like an obscure diagram in chalk lines on a blackboard, VOW presents the dilemma of the promise as a bizarre, maze-like architecture seen from above.
In her latest work from 2010, Pheobus draws from a mélange of sources, uniting disparate strains of visual influence from places significant in her life - most notably rural Wyoming and Lahore, Pakistan, where she currently lives and works.
Dar al-, a drawing composed on site at the gallery, abstracts the stark, vertical form of the American ranch sign into a labyrinthine diagram inscribed on the horizontal surface of the floor. The complexity of Dar al- emerges from a single unbroken line, scrupulously composed to dually reference the archetypal symbol of the American ranch, as well as the intricate archways of Islamic architecture, forming an unexpected convergence of disparate cultures. Drawing from her experiences of anomie in both Wyoming and
Lahore, the artist reflects upon her own cultural hybridity and uprootedness, of being liminally captive between space and place, otherness and belonging.
Alyssa Pheobus divides her time between New York and Lahore. She received her BA from Yale in 2004 and an MFA from Columbia in 2008. Her work has been shown widely in the United States, including solo exhibitions at Tracy Williams, Ltd. and Bellwether in New York, both in 2009.
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