Angela fraleigh is known for monumental canvasses that explore fantasy, sexuality and nostalgia.she is presented by inman gallery in Houston, tx and has exhibited at such venues as P.P.O.W Gallery, new york, NY, Mark moore gallery, LA, CA, the kemper museum of contemporary art, and the museum of fine arts, Houston. Fraleigh received her BFA from boston university and her MFA from Yale one.
Words by Maria Mokina
Installation shot of "The quietest sounds on Earth" from "Do I know you" Inman Gallery, Houston, TX, 2010
My mother was a teenager when I was born. She formed her dreams and aspirations from the world she viewed on television and at the movies. As a child, living in a trailer, the reality of our day- to-day life was juxtaposed with other people’s stories, other’s dreams that defined, to us, what being successful and happy in America was about.
This intrigue with how narrative structures or stories are created, sustained and, often, idealised has informed my subsequent career and defined, to a large degree, the parameters of the discourse present in my current paintings.
Inman Gallery, 2001
The process of painting these images alternates between control and chance. Though I paint the figurative elements upright in a traditional manner, I disrupt this practice by laying the canvas horizontal and pouring on to it mixtures of oils and synthetic resin. I go back and forth like this as many times as it takes to resolve the piece. It is generally assumed that I paint the whole painting and then pour stuff on top but its really a back and forth from the very beginning stages.
I liken the experience to a collaborative process, as it inevitably invites indiscriminate painterly moments that I don’t intentionally create or control. The migration of paint moving across the panel, chemically alters whatever is in it’s path, destroying the once “precious” image. This results in unpredictable effects, as the pores mix with wet brushed paint. Sometimes the paint will lift and flake the figure, leaving islands of «skin» floating in juicy slabs of paint. Other times it will bead and pool
into mitochondrial shaped colonies. Conceptually this allows the paint to function as a protagonist in the narrative. The physicality of the paint both cankers and covers the story obscuring individuals and becoming a carrier of meaning.
My background includes a BFA from Boston University on a merit based Dean’s Scholarship. Also, MFA from Yale University where I was awarded the Alice Kimball English Travel Grant, enabling a research tour in Europe. My work has been exhibited widely in the US, as well as internationally including P.P.O.W Gallery, NY, NY, Inman Gallery Houston, TX, Kulturemollen, Lovestad, Sweden, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO, and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, TX.
I have been nominated for the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, the Louis Comfort Tiffany grant, and have participated in several international artist-in-residence programs.
My work is currently on view at Rachael Blackburn Cozad in Kansas City, MO. Most recently, I was awarded a Studio fellowship at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in NY, NY and I look forward to several upcoming group shows this year as well as my 4th solo exhibition Fall 2014 at Inman Gallery.
I live in work in Allentown, PA and New York, NY with my husband, artist Wes Heiss and our daughter Tuesday.
Slight | (oil and alkyd resin on canvas over panel; 72x96 ft; 2007)
You Weren’t Haunted Those Two Days, You Were Flooded With Light | (oil and gouache on canvas over panel; 66x96 ft; 2013)
The Quietest Sounds On Earth | (oil on canvas; 96x192 ft; 2010)
Even | (oil and galkyd resin on canvas over panel; 72 x 96ft.; 2007)
Until This | (oil on panel; 6x8ft; 2006)