ALLYSON GLENN: Bliss and the Dreadful Sublime

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Allyson Glenn, "Bliss and the Dreadful Sublime, 2017

opening: Saturday, October 7th at 2:00pm

Allyson Glenn has had an extremely active exhibition schedule since 2014, presenting her work throughout Canada, the United States, and Europe in solo, two-person, and group exhibitions. Art Placement is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of her paintings in both the city and province.

The exhibition draws from two bodies of work inspired by residencies overseas: one in Greece and the other in Spain. In Greece, her temporary studio at the Vorres Museum in Paiania was surrounded by vast architectural gardens set within massive stone walls and guarded by mythological sculptural figures. The romantic setting inspired thoughts around division and protection, as well as classical beauty, myth, and magic. In Spain, Glenn worked in the arid national park of Sierra María Los Vélez, where agriculture once flourished, but today few residents remain. The hills are now pitted with abandoned almond trees and homes, a vista that inspired Glenn to undertake a series addressing themes around water, abandonment, sustainability, and the sublime, but brutal beauty of Spain’s driest regions.The works from Greece present lush landscapes rich in classical beauty, while the paintings of Spain present an inhospitable landscape that is a site of ecological ruin, captivating but not necessarily beautiful. Glenn connects the latter series to the philosophical and artistic tradition of the sublime, in which artists grappled with expressing the grandeur of the natural world and the humbling experience of its power and scale. While the sensation does not conform to the familiar experience of pleasure associated with beauty, there is nonetheless a certain kind of delight that seems to blend fear and attraction; what one philosopher called an “agreeable kind of horror”.

Allyson Glenn is an Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of Saskatchewan. She has been the recipient of numerous Awards and Grants, and her work is part of private and public collections, including the University of Calgary and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. She has exhibited extensively for nearly two decades across Canada and internationally in the United States, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, China, Czech Republic, India, and Switzerland. This is her first solo exhibition at the gallery, featuring new works from two current series.