University at Buffalo (UB)
Take Five
Melissa Dadourian, Soft Weirdo Installation No. 2, 2019. Thread, yarn, hand-dyed fabric, nails, 60 x 120 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
September 14, 2019–January 12, 2020
Meghan Brady, Adriane Colburn, Melissa Dadourian, Tricia Keightley, and Meg Lipke
Take Five is a group exhibition featuring the work of contemporary artists Meghan Brady, Adriane Colburn, Melissa Dadourian, Tricia Keightley and Meg Lipke. These women use fiber-stuffed sculpture, sewn serger thread and yarn, oversized paper collage, wood sculpture and painted canvases to reinterpret traditional abstract painting. They are countering a once male-dominated art form by working outside the rectangle in an expanded field.
Calling for a more challenging abstraction, Meghan Brady creates enormous paper-collaged pieces that indirectly reference the human body. Adriane Colburn conjures bent wood sculptural installations, which she extracts from research into global systems and data that is collected. Melissa Dadourian assembles textile-based wall installations made of materials she has sewn, dyed or knit. Tricia Keightley works within a stretched canvas, but she eliminates the rectangle by floating her imagined mechanical abstractions on a pool of flat color. Rather than wrapping her canvas on a traditional rectangular stretcher, Meg Lipke chooses to paint on cloth, which she sews and stuffs to create organic shapes that rest against the wall or on the floor. In bringing these artists with such diverse practices together, the exhibition aims to showcase how women artists today are creating their own language and stepping out from traditional abstraction.
Spanning both UB Art Gallery locations the UB Anderson Gallery installation will be on view from September 14, 2019, through January 12, 2020, while the UB CFA Gallery installation will close on December 14, 2019.
The exhibition and catalog received generous support from Charles Balbach. Additional support is provided by the Arts Collaboratory, Holly Levy, and Eleven Twenty Projects.