Eleanor Aldrich, Guen Montgomery
About the Exhibition:
In this exhibition, Aldrich and Montgomery in their respective ways grapple with modernism as an aesthetic and cultural force. One that not only has affected their grand-mothers generation but one that has current ramifications for them as female artists.
The grid has physical and metaphorical impact for those forced into and through it, and the aesthetics artifacts and influences of the era remain to remind us of the boxes within the grid and how to fit into them.
About the Artists:
ELEANOR ALDRICH was born in Springerville, Arizona. A participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, she also holds an MFA in Painting & Drawing from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she currently lives. She earned her BFA in Painting & Drawing through the Academie Minerva (Groningen, the Netherlands) and Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff. She was a participant in the DrawingCenter’s first Open Sessions. Eleanor is a co-director of CforCourtside, an artist-run gallery in Knoxville, TN, and works in a long-distance collaboration ALDRICH+WEISSBERGER with the artist Barbara Weissberger. Eleanor has had solo shows in Boston, Nashville, Knoxville, Flagstaff, AZ, and at the University of Alabama. Her work has been shown at Saltworks Gallery and White Space (Atlanta, GA), the Drawing Center (New York, NY), Grin (Providence, RI) and Ortega y Gasset (New York, NY). Her work was chosen for 1708 Gallery’s ‘FEED 2013’ (Richmond, VA). She has been awarded an Endowment for the Arts through the Whiteman Foundation, and the Herman E. Spivey Fellowship. Her work has been included in New American Paintings, and reviewed in Art in America and on Artforum.com Aldrich is represented by Channel to Channel gallery located in Nashville, Tennessee.
GUEN MONTGOMERY is an artist and performer whose work investigates identity through studies of gender, regional narrative, and family mythology. Guen received her BFA from the University of Hawaii at Manoa and her MFA in printmaking from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Currently Guen lives in Urbana, IL, where she teaches art foundations and printmaking at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Guen’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is in multiple public collections, including the Centre for Art and Design in Churchill, Australia, and the Iowa Print Group Archive. Guen is the 2016 recipient of the Integrative Teaching International Emerging Educator Fellowship and a recipient of the Urbana Public Arts Commission’s 2016 Arts Grant.