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Secrets in Place, Ayhens’s first exhibition at Tayloe Piggott Gallery, presents a selection of oil paintings and ink and watercolor works from the mid-1990s to the present. For the past forty years, Ayhens has focused much of her practice on the creation of environmental allegories, each as whimsical as they are catastrophic, which fuse antithetical and imaginary worlds into "jumbled panoramas,” according to Hyperallergic's Stephen Maine. Her inventive contemporary landscapes amalgamate nature and man-made environments, creating implausible realms of juxtaposed skyscrapers perched on cliffsides on Northern California, as seen in Bejeweling the Massif (2009), or bustling traffic in a remote desert, as seen in Outskirts of Roswell (2014). Critic Jerry Saltz has described Ayhens’s work as “intertwining postapocalyptic narratives and prelapsarian bliss… Part Bosch, part Coney Island of the mind’s eye, these works place us inside scenes of destruction as curious gods look into and down on widening worlds.”
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Simultaneously collapsing and expanding, corkscrewing and unraveling, Ayhens’s compositions evolve more or less autobiographically, taking from the many places where she has spent time, especially through the numerous residencies she has been awarded throughout her career. Ayhens strives to capture an essence of each place she composes, reconceptualizing, distorting, and rebuilding these places from her memory, her subconscious and, most importantly, from her imagination. Ayhens has taken care to deeply absorb the places she has spent time, as even her works featuring fragmented and amalgamated loci impart a profound and idiosyncratic sense of place. Her warping of space and place often imbues potent environmental implications into her works. Even so, in Ayhens’s creations, as The New Yorker's Andrea K. Scott articulates, "whimsy tends to outstrip dread.”
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Ayhens upholds that her work is grounded in abstraction. She embraces the language and aesthetics of abstract painting in her focus on exploring color relationships, texture, scale, and the compression and expansion of space. Above all, Ayhens is driven by her “love of the paint itself- with layering it, with building textures, et cetera.” Ayhens has long been praised for her willingness to allow realism to dissolve into pure abstraction in her color-rich, kaleidoscopic works in which linear perspective is not utilized to anchor space, but rather to destabilize it.
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SECRETS IN PLACE: OLIVE AYHENS
Past viewing_room
