As They Touch
Amy Pleasant
March 26 - April 23, 2022Brackett Creek Editions, Chinatown, NY
CV / Artist Bio
Press Release
Interview between The Fuel and Lumber Company and Brackett Creek Exhibitions
Brackett Creek is proud to present As They
Touch, a 2-color silkscreen on ink-stained
paper by Amy Pleasant. The edition of 12 was
created between Birmingham, Alabama and
Bozeman, Montana during the 2020 quarantine
and will be exhibited alongside Pleasant’s
drawings, painting, and sculpture.
Pleasant works freely across an expansive range of mediums with limited palette and form. Shades of white, grey, black, and blue show up in seemingly endless variations of background/foreground and positive/negative in singular or multiple compositions of partial and whole human silhouettes.
Rather than a lineage of representational painting, Pleasant’s bodies are more akin to Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint series, in which his restrained body fights to make a performative mark; scrawls, scratches, dots and footprints become a drawing of human physicality. Her repetitive drawing and painting of arms, legs, heads, torsos, and full figures strip the representational language of the body of its descriptors, leaving the impression of a figure (the mark on the bed after the body has left), as opposed to the smiles, frowns, gazes, cultural and emotional signifiers one generally reads in figurative painting.
Amy Pleasant received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1994) and an MFA from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University (1999).
She has held solo exhibitions at Geary Contemporary (NYC/Millerton, NY), Laney Contemporary (Savannah, GA), Institute 193 (Lexington, KY), Jeff Bailey Gallery (Hudson/NYC), whitespace gallery (Atlanta, GA), Augusta University (Columbus, GA), Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art (IN), Birmingham Museum of Art (AL), Atlanta Contemporary (GA), Auburn University’s School of Liberal Arts (AL), Rhodes College (Memphis, TN), Candyland (Stockholm, Sweden), and the University of Alabama at Birmingham (AL) among others.
Pleasant also co-founded the curatorial initiative The Fuel And Lumber Company with artist Pete Schulte in 2013. They curated the group exhibition, Nocturne, which will run concurrently with this show in Unit 210.
Pleasant works freely across an expansive range of mediums with limited palette and form. Shades of white, grey, black, and blue show up in seemingly endless variations of background/foreground and positive/negative in singular or multiple compositions of partial and whole human silhouettes.
Rather than a lineage of representational painting, Pleasant’s bodies are more akin to Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint series, in which his restrained body fights to make a performative mark; scrawls, scratches, dots and footprints become a drawing of human physicality. Her repetitive drawing and painting of arms, legs, heads, torsos, and full figures strip the representational language of the body of its descriptors, leaving the impression of a figure (the mark on the bed after the body has left), as opposed to the smiles, frowns, gazes, cultural and emotional signifiers one generally reads in figurative painting.
Amy Pleasant received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1994) and an MFA from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University (1999).
She has held solo exhibitions at Geary Contemporary (NYC/Millerton, NY), Laney Contemporary (Savannah, GA), Institute 193 (Lexington, KY), Jeff Bailey Gallery (Hudson/NYC), whitespace gallery (Atlanta, GA), Augusta University (Columbus, GA), Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art (IN), Birmingham Museum of Art (AL), Atlanta Contemporary (GA), Auburn University’s School of Liberal Arts (AL), Rhodes College (Memphis, TN), Candyland (Stockholm, Sweden), and the University of Alabama at Birmingham (AL) among others.
Pleasant also co-founded the curatorial initiative The Fuel And Lumber Company with artist Pete Schulte in 2013. They curated the group exhibition, Nocturne, which will run concurrently with this show in Unit 210.