AMY PLEASANT

Exhibition details:

On View: November 10, 2023 – January 13, 2024

Reception: Friday, November 10, 6:00 - 8:30 pm

Laney Contemporary is pleased to welcome Birmingham-based artist Amy Pleasant back to Savannah with her second solo exhibition at the gallery entitled FragmenT FOLD bloom. This selection of work is physical; it fragments and folds and allows the body to bloom into what feels like an ancient alphabet of gestures. The work ranges in material expression and engages the whole and the fragmented form in solitude or in serene connection.

Through a variety of shapes, Pleasant’s figures embody gestures and silhouettes of stillness or dynamic interplay. Some fold into themselves while others duplicate into a twin. Still others “bloom” outward into X shapes embracing as much space as they can claim. Throughout Pleasant’s practice, bodies are distilled into shapes that perceptually shift between foreground and background, positive and negative spaces. The body merges with the letter X in Pleasant’s visual vocabulary as both affirmation and negation, holding place as the “I am here” gesture. They are figurative shapes with both qualities, expressing the full capacity of human form and the incredible potential of the body. But X is just one expression as Pleasant’s work explores its own language of shape and gesture, curve, and corner. It undertakes a kind of poetic alphabet of the body in a visual form. It appears these forms have always existed, as if hieroglyphic and timeless.

For the full press release, click here.