The Happy Lion is pleased to present the second solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Allison Cortson.  As in her previous show, Cortson has taken dust, one of the world’s most inevitable and overlooked substances, and used it to craft a haunting series of portraits.  This time, however, Cortson has complemented her portraits with a set of landscapes also made of dirt as well as a pair of drawings based on particle acceleration.

Cortson’s portraits literally capture her subjects. Not only are these portraits of the artist’s friends and acquaintances rendered with great precision, but their surroundings are sketched with dust collected over a period of time from the very environments in which they are represented.  By painting solid objects with the barely-there substance into which they disintegrate, Cortson reminds us that most of matter is empty space. 

In a departure from her previous work, Cortson has for this show used her “dust painting” techniques to create an enigmatic series of landscapes.  These have a loose, ambivalent quality that seems to express a longing for a human subject.  It almost as though these actual empty spaces are coming apart in the absence of a focalizing human presence.

Finally, there is a pair of drawings inspired by particle acceleration experiments that trace the chaotic results of slamming two particles together.   The collision creates lines and patterns that are evidence of the even smaller components that make up the particles. Again the space between things is emphasized but is here expressed as energy rather than loss.

 
Allison Cortson was born in Santa Monica, California in 1978.  She received her B.A. in Art from the University of California Los Angeles and her MFA from the California Institute for the Arts.  She has had a solo show at Galerie Michael Janssen in Cologne, Germany and has been included in many group shows including most recently Dear Mr. Saltz at Pharmaka Gallery and Campari: 25 Bold Moves.  She has recently been commissioned to paint a cover for Flaunt magazine.  Allison Cortson lives and works in Los Angeles.