Locks Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new and recent work by Ann Agee. Rules of the Pattern will be on view November 19 through December 30, 2010. There will a reception for the artist on Friday, December 3rd from 5:30 to 7:30pm.
Agee makes her home the subject of her work—images that are both recognizable and unusual in their serial, accumulation. The artist explores the intersection of domestic space and art production, illustrating the rooms of her home on porcelain platters and bowls, and creating large scale wallpaper installations.
At Locks Gallery, Agee presents three sculptural works, each of which is comprised of multiple, hand-built, porcelain platters and/or bowls mounted on steel armatures. Her images of interiors and furniture create an atypical china pattern and these flashes of domestic life, alternately comic and ordinary, suggest the human presence, although the figure is never shown. Agee will also exhibit a large grouping of finely crafted and elaborately sculpted white vases, itself an austere exercise in multiplicity and variation of profile.
As in previous installations, the artist will hang large-scale, hand painted and stenciled wallpaper depicting idealized interiors. These expansive, inviting spaces drawn on the scale of 19th-century Zuber-like panoramas, recall Matisse’s Red Room and alternately the stark, clutter-free spaces depicted by Lichtenstein. Agee’s Locks Gallery show comes between two major installations at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA, (2010) and at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY (2011).
Agee’s work been seen in prominent clay exhibitions Dirt on Delight, Institute of Contemporary Art, PA (traveled to the Walker Art Center, MN) and Conversations in Clay, Katonah Art Museum, NY. Agee taught at Princeton University as a Visiting Lecturer at the Lewis Center for the Arts (2006-2010). She has been a recipient of The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (1997) and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1992, 1989), among others. Her work is in the collections of: The Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY; The Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; The RISD Art Museum, RI; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; The Henry Art Museum in Seattle, WA; The Kohler Art Center in Sheboygan, WI; The Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami, FL.
