A daydream will last along into the night

Amelia Carley & Ally White

ON VIEW: June 7 - August 25, 2018

OPENING RECEPTION: Thursday, June 7, 6 – 9 PM

HATHAWAY is proud to present A daydream will last along into the night, a two-person exhibition of new works by Amelia Carley and Ally White. Carley and White create imagined, dreamy environments to address themes of memory, anxiety, romance, loneliness, and loss. Both artists concentrate heavily on painting, while touching on craft with the addition of White’s large scale needle-felting and Carley’s DIY sculptural models for her equally monumental paintings. Their resulting bodies of work come to terms with issues of contemporary female experience and environmental futures by playfully teetering between reality and fantasy, familiar and unfamiliar. 

Amelia Carley is an artist making work concerning the interpretation of memories within landscape and fictitious sites. Born and raised in Colorado, Carley received her BFA from University of Colorado at Boulder. She received an MFA from Georgia State University where was a Dean’s Fellow and recipient of the Andrew M. West Memorial Scholarship. Carley has exhibited at such venues as: SOMArts (San Francisco, CA), Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (Salt Lake City, UT), Hathaway Gallery (Atlanta, GA), Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (Boulder, CO), Hyperlink Gallery (Chicago, IL), Curfman Gallery at Colorado State University (Fort Collins, CO), Day & Night Projects (Atlanta, GA), Galleries of Contemporary Art at University of Colorado (Colorado Springs, CO), Photographic Arts Center (Denver, CO), Glass Gallery at University of Georgia (Athens, GA), and SOUP Experimental (Tallahassee, FL). She has participated in several Artist-in-Resident programs including Vermont Studio Center and Atlantic Center for the Arts. In 2017, Carley was awarded an Artist Project Grant through the Atlanta Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs. She currently lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia.

Through my work I construct a visual representation of an artificial place, a study of an invented land. Based on fabricated maquettes modeled after my early memories of visits to spectacular sites and deserts in the American Southwest, these miniature models become monumental as paintings. By re-examining early memories of desolate – yet, curated – landscapes, these works unearth feelings of loss and inevitable change.

I build the small sculptural references out of play sand, saturated acrylic paint, broken glass, and glue dripping those materials over synthetic armatures of aluminum foil and cellophane. Using colored gels, I light them for a specific time of day. Once photographed and digitally altered, the images serve as a reference for the paintings. In this process of creating an artificial landscape, I am interested in the disparity between these rudimentary sculptural references and the final seductive images.

These hyper-saturated and romanticized paintings deploy photo blur and crisp photoshopped edges to evoke a feeling of “unreality,” of a world where fabricated mountain ranges meet attractive fades and imagined celestial arrangements. As with my memories, the works shift between clarity and haze, retelling and reimaging. Through the fusion of manufactured and geological material these works allude to a visually beautiful but potentially disquieting environmental future. This survey of a fabricated landscape serves as an examination of indeterminate place and time as a mode of questioning notions of the sublime and idealized landscape.

Ally White grew up in Dallas, GA and received her BFA in painting from the University of Georgia in 2013. Her work has been exhibited across the country in venues such as the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Hashimoto Contemporary, Zero Zero LA, ATHICA, MINT Gallery, Art Market SF, Art on Paper NYC and HATHAWAY Contemporary Gallery. White has held solo exhibitions in San Juan, PR at Trailer Park Projects and in Atlanta, GA at Eyedrum Gallery. Most recently her work was featured in the annual pop-up exhibition INTO ACTION, a social-Justice themed art fair in Los Angeles, CA. She was featured on the cover of New American Paintings #106, and was selected as a “Jury Picks” for 100 Painters of Tomorrow, a publication produced by Beers Contemporary in London. She currently lives and works in San Jose, CA.

White’s paintings and needle-felted works depict day-dreaming figures and the lush multicolored world they live in. They are intuitive responses to everyday surroundings that are transformed into unfamiliar and fictional situations. Investigating contrasting themes of happiness, anxiety, loneliness and self-comfort, each painting works to balance and cope through the use of color, humor and play.

(L) Ally White, Petting the Poodle in the Garden, 2018, acrylic on panel

(R) Amelia Carley, Mount Lucent (daybreak anecdote), 2018, oil on canvas