This exhibition was scheduled November 18, 2023-March 10, 2023.
The San Luis Obispo Museum of Art presents a solo exhibition by mixed media painter Alisa Sikelianos-Carter in the museum’s Gray Wing now through March 10, 2024.
“In Space and Splendor: A Topography of Wildness” explores unconditional, ancestral, and ancient Blackness through large installations of works on paper and small sculptures. The new body of work builds on the artist’s recent Crown series, a collection of abstract prints utilizing web and catalogue-sourced imagery of Black hair that represents ancestral beings—creating what she calls a “divine technology.”
Sikelianos-Carter removes the limitation of the small print sizes, allowing her abstract shapes to spread onto the walls, creating an immersive world that cultivates a feeling of expansive infinity, of taking over. She moves distinctly away from the figure, leaning into abstraction to create her magical worlds. Inspired by geography and geology, Sikelianos-Carter envisions a world where ostracized communities take up boundless and unlimited space. Throughout the gallery, on the floor, Sikelianos-Carter places small, grainy, rock forms that resemble the surfaces of planets, re-emphasizing an other-worldly environment—a celestially divine land of freedom. Intricately layered with texture and glitter, the installation reminisces relief sculpture that consumes the whole wall, changing with each angle.
Accompanying the exhibition is an off-site installation at Hotel San Luis Obispo, including two large-scale prints from the Crown series and small new works on paper mounted directly on the wall.
This exhibition is presented by California Polytechnic State University Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’s Resonance Cultural Arts Series, with additional support from Hotel San Luis Obispo and KSBY.