ONEIRIC LANDSCAPES

Sara Kathryn Arledge, Trisha Baga, David McDonald, Alexandra Grant, Greg Ito, Jasmine Little, Tahnee Lonsdale, L, Aubrey Ingmar Manson, Max Maslansky, David McDonald, Alan Prazniak, Raychael Stine, Flora Wiegmann

“Oneiric Landscapes” brings together works of art by 12 contemporary artists loosely inspired by the marks, forms and ideas created by Sara Kathryn Arledge during a very creative era around 1966. At the core of the exhibition, four unseen works on paper made by Arledge become a visionary stage for a playful exploration of fantastical dreamscapes. The landscape is opened up to reveal multiple expressions and media, contained in a dream-like field of vision. Brush strokes become body parts, limbs morph into mountains or tree-branches, and clouds masque as steam from a “fantasy train” emerging out of a field and body of water. Many cultures uphold the significance of oneirism, and “dreaming” always comprises the significance of place. The “landscape” in this exhibition, a classic trope in painting, and one frequently utilized in Arledge’s work, is our oneiric point of departure. Artist/dancer Flora Wiegmann, will create a dance at The Energetic Residency above the gallery dates/time to be announced shortly.

Sara Kathryn Arledge (1911-1998) was a prolific and under recognized artist who emphasized the eerie in the mundane and the disorienting in the beautiful. Arledge worked at the margins of art history, shaping her practice with idiosyncratic personal myth. She is considered a pioneer of ciné-dance (dance made uniquely by and for the medium of film) and was one of the first to film dance movement to “extend the nature of painting to include time.” Arledge lived and worked primarily between Pasadena and Santa Cruz, California. Born in Mojave, California, she lived most of her life between Pasadena and Santa Cruz. Arledge’s personal life was shadowed by trauma. She lived with mental illness and was institutionalized against her will. Her relationship with her only child was complicated, and as a troubled young man he committed suicide.

Arledge received a Bachelor of Education in Art from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1963. She attended and taught at Columbia University in 1934 and at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia in 1934-1935, and taught in the Department of Art at the University of Oklahoma from 1943-1944 and at the University of Arizona, Tucson from 1945-1946. This exhibition runs concurrent with the first major survey of Arledge at the Armory in Pasadena, open through May 12th 2019.