Opening reception: June 5, 6–8pm

 

Outside features artists working in landscape and outdoor genre scenes, some based on reality and others imagined, and is envisioned as a companion exhibition to Inside, our previous show of still lifes and domestic interiors. Outside broadly represents Fleisher/Ollman’s dedication to historical self-taught art, trained contemporary artists, and artists working in progressive studios. Here, artists explore scenes of bucolic nature and the grittily urban through both plein-air and studio practices; play with notions of representation and the conceptual underpinnings of what constitutes landscape painting; queerify and diversify heteronormative class narratives in outdoor leisure space; use landscape as an entryway for sublime, psychedelic, and fantastical explorations; and, like several of the artists featured in Inside, probe thresholds between the inside and outside realms.

 

David Aipperspach (b. 1987, lives and works in Philadelphia) investigates the conventions of landscape painting with a hall of mirrors effect in the large-scale work on view. A group of deer peer out into a landscape contemplating another herd. Is what they are pondering itself a painting, a painted theatrical backdrop? Or might the deer be looking at themselves at another moment in time? The trompe l’oeil frame adds to the conundrum of the interpretive experience.

 

James Castle (1899-1977, lived and worked in Garden Valley and Boise, ID) is recognized as one of the pre-eminent self-taught artists of the 20th century. Born deaf and having never learned to speak, sign or write, Castle poured himself into art making—he is especially renowned for his soot and saliva interior and landscape drawings on found paper and packaging materials.

 

Joy Feasley’s (b. 1966, lives and works Philadelphia) paintings often depict dream-like landscapes that recall the 19th century Romantic sublime tradition (think Caspar David Friedrich or J.M.W. Turner) overlaid with sacred geometries of alternate belief systems. Feasley also works collaboratively with her partner, Paul Swenbeck, on large-scale installations.

 

Anjali Goodwin (b. 1997, lives and works Philadelphia) paints still lifes and landscapes. She has a particular fondness for depicting waterfalls, rivers, and how nature is reflected in water. Goodwin works out of the Center for Creative Works, a progressive studio in Wynnewood and Philadelphia.

 

Peter Allen Hoffmann (b. 1979, lives and works Philadelphia) is best known for abstraction but has also maintains a parallel practice of landscape painting. As an artist comfortable in working across both, Hoffmann enjoys the challenge of employing abstraction to realist ends: representing a forest’s density, sunlight beaming through trees, stones in a dry riverbed, or decaying leaves on a forest floor. Memory and intuitive response are more important to Hoffmann than verisimilitude.

 

Sarah McEneaney (b. 1955, lives and works Philadelphia, PA) synthesizes reality of daily life with fantasy in autobiographical paintings employing perspectives both off-kilter and omniscient. Her works have a surreal quality in which the scene is seemingly depicted by an all-seeing story teller/artist invisibly hovering above. The paintings on view in Outside depict scenes from a 2023 residency in Ireland.

 

Keenly studying the world around him and honoring, as the artist explains, “the little stories,” be it the everyday realm of home or the sublime beauty of coastal South New Jersey, John Joseph Mitchell (b. 1989, lives and works Tuckahoe, NJ) translates the act of looking into small paintings set in handmade frames.

 

Henry Murphy (b. 1995, lives and works Philadelphia, PA) is dedicated to the plein-air tradition and the vagaries of memory in composing his small mysterious paintings where landscape metamorphoses into dreamy abstraction. Murphy sees his practice as occupying the in-between space of classic landscape painting and the imagination where idealism detours into atmospheric spontaneity.

 

Samantha Nye’s (b. circa 1980s, lives Philadelphia) recent paintings appropriate the compositions of Slim Aaron’s 1960s-70s photographs of opulent settings and their wealthy inhabitants. However, Nye removes Aaron’s subjects and replaces them with lesbian elders of different ethnicities in various states of undress and erotic pleasure. Nye also creates videos and installations riffing off of 1960s Scopitone films bringing her paintings further to life.

 

Bethann Parker (b. 1984, resides Saylorsburg, PA, works Easton, PA) lives sustainably in the Pocono Mountains region of Pennsylvania, where she and her family raise much of their own food. Exhibited works showcase the rural landscape with distant views from the artist’s home as well as nearby scenes from within their homestead. Parker’s painting technique resembles embroidery stitching and pays homage to her mother’s craft, as well the artist’s interest in antique textiles.

 

Joseph Yoakum (1890-1972, lived Chicago, IL) of Cherokee, African-American, and French-American ancestry, began drawing his fantastical landscapes while living in Chicago in his later years. He claimed the locations were drawn from memories of his time spent in numerous circuses as a youth, as a soldier serving with the U.S. Army during World War I in Europe, as a vagabond rail rider, and as a stowaway and stevedore in Asia and Australia.

 

Sophie White (b. 1984, lives and works in Philadelphia, PA) paints from observation en plein air using her representational skills to showcase the fast pace of gentrification and shoddy condominium construction in Philadelphia, especially focusing on the Fishtown/Kensington neighborhood, where she resides. White grew up in lower Manhattan which first attuned her to spatial politics, gentrification, and the displacement of residents.

 

Nasir Young’s (b. 1995, lives Willow Grove, PA ) paintings are focused on particular aspects of the urban environment: quirky retail signage, the entropy of cities in the midst of change, the conversations that occur on urban surfaces between graffiti and poster advertisements. Skateboarding first attuned Young to the sensorial surfeit of the city, demanding a kind of sixth sense to locate the best skate spots, which in turn heightened awareness of the urban landscape, compelling him to paint it.