Two Points in the Sky, Schoolhouse Projects, Greenwich, NJ, 2022
Curated by Bill Adair
Schoolhouse Projects presents its inaugural event, Two Points in the Sky, a one-day solo exhibition by Alexis Granwell and a duo performance by Christina Gesualdi and Jesse Kudler. This celebration of the upcoming autumn equinox takes place at Schoolhouse Projects in Greenwich, NJ.
Two Points in the Sky is a pop-up event exploring art in nature, painterly sculpture within the landscape, and improvisational movement and music among the sights and the sounds of the country. The idea for the exhibition came when veteran Philadelphia curator Bill Adair visited Granwell’s studio and found themselves discussing gardening. Adair suggested that Granwell put her paper (cotton and linen fiber) sculptures within his yard amongst the vegetables and flowers. The works’ materiality is rooted in the natural world, so it only makes sense to display them outside among greenery.
Schoolhouse Projects, created by Bill Adair and Tom Grammer, is a series of art, food, and garden adventures at a nineteenth two-room schoolhouse in the Delaware Bayshore area of South Jersey.
Intimate Immensity Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum, Philadelphia, PA, 2019
Curated by Alexis Granwell
El Anatsui, Lynda Benglis, Chakaia Booker, Louise Bourgeois, Judy Chicago, Alexis Granwell, Fabienne Lasserre, Brie Ruais, Michelle Segre, Joan Snyder, and Sun You.
Intimate Immensity presents work dealing with touch, materiality, the sensual, and the subversive. Whether an object or image, the works in the show engage with the abstract vocabulary of the psyche, the body, memory, mythology, and the decorative.
As Bea Huff Hunter writes in her essay for the exhibition, the work of these 11 artists is cast as feminist: "Collective, restorative, experienced by many folks, and so, so bodily. The tactility of folds, wrinkles, lumps, curves, dots, and twists sends me back and forth in a sort of sensual conversation between my body and the 'bodies' of many of the works."
Individual Gravities Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Philadelphia, PA, 2018
Curated by Alex Ebstein
Alexis Granwell, Elana Herzog, Trish Tilman
Individual Gravities brings together the works of three artists whose practices stretch between classifications of sculpture, painting, and installation. Dense, rigid materials achieve levitation, while paper, fabric and voluminous structures take on density and weight, rooted to their supporting planes. Conceptual and thematic overlaps subtly weave together an environment that examines material value through a personal and social lens. Reclaimed and found materials are minimally altered, presented as small monuments or added as adornments to constructed surface. While gravity acts as a force defied by this group of work, it also connotes significant importance and points to the three individual perspectives.
Alchemy, Typology, Entropy Fleisher/ Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, PA, 2017
Alexis Granwell, Peter Allen Hoffmann, Adam Lovitz
Fleisher/Ollman’s summer exhibition presents three miniature solo shows by three Philadelphia artists. The exhibition title reflects respective descriptors as an entry point to tease out meaning within and across each distinct body of work.
Alexis Granwell’s background in print and paper-making imbues her sculpture with a unique material sensibility. Adhering handmade paper to papier-mâché and wire armatures, Granwell creates forms that suggest eroded bodies, bodily fragments, and biomorphic shapes—a fusion of Jean Arp, Constantin Brancusi, and classical sculpture by way of the entropy of millenia. Accentuating the forlorn, Granwell uses a variety of coloring techniques (spraying, spilling and brushing) to suggest lichen encrustation and erosion. Granwell’s organic forms are radically juxtaposed with the pristine, rectilinear, monochrome pedestals of wood or concrete block on which they’re installed. Granwell’s attention to the pedestal as a sculptural object equal in weight to the works that lie on top places her in the company of recent contemporary sculptors (Matthew Monahan, Huma Bhaba, Thomas Houseago, and Lisa Lipinski) who creatively explore the aesthetic function of the base (all indebted to Brancusi). Like the artists mentioned above, Granwell’s work departs from the all-encompassing aspirations of installation art that gained traction over the last 30 years and instead returns sculpture to a discrete entity occupying a more circumscribed notion of space. In dialogue with Adam Lovitz’s paintings that conjure the surfaces of ancient rocks and minerals, perhaps Granwell’s biomorphs are not ruins after all, but scholar stones placed respectfully on oddly yet carefully crafted bases for deep contemplation. In any regard, Granwell’s evocation of entropy through sculptural form resonates with Lovitz’s paintings that explore sedimentation and the passage of time, and the geometry of Granwell’s pedestals pair well with Hoffmann’s geometric abstract paintings.
