October 11, 2025 – January 4, 2026
Places are not inert; they are repositories for all that has passed through them. In Allison Gildersleeve’s work, time is not sequential and location is not fixed. Gildersleeve picks apart and reassembles the familiar, using the variability of memory as her guide. As she puts the pieces together, her work skips through time at an erratic pace, shuffling the monumental with the mundane and twisting landscapes and interiors into compositional mazes. Gildersleeve grew up in the southeastern corner of Connecticut in a colonial farmhouse surrounded by acres of woods. She returns again and again to the settings of her childhood – wooded areas, home interiors, open highways, back country roads – to show that repeated visits to the same place invariably result in wildly divergent depictions.
Image: Allison Gildersleeve, A Years Time, 2024, oil on canvas, 60″ x 66″.
Gildersleeve keeps a sketchbook of ink drawings where she reduces her surroundings into a simple iconography. This becomes an alphabet that she uses to compose her paintings. Each object becomes a stand-in for a time or place and when they meet on the canvas; they pull together disparate experiences into one compressed timeline. There’s a narrative overload to Gildersleeve’s work in that each layer carries the immediacy of a moment in real time, whether it happened an hour or a decade ago.
Allison Gildersleeve, After the Fall, 2025, oil and acrylic on canvas, 50″ x 42″.
Allison Gildersleeve, Ship in a Bottle, 2025, oil and acrylic on canvas, 50″ x 42″.
Allison Gildersleeve, Static Electric, 2025, oil and acrylic on canvas, 50″ x 42″.
Allison Gildersleeve received her MFA from Bard College in 2004, and her BA from College of William and Mary in 1992. Gildersleeve has exhibited widely across the United States and abroad. Notable solo exhibitions include Duck Creek Arts Center (East Hampton, NY), Asya Geisberg Gallery (New York, NY), Auxiliary Projects (Brooklyn, NY), Robischon Gallery (Denver, CO), Cynthia Reeves (Walpole NH), Valley House Gallery (Dallas, TX), The George Gallery (Charleston, SC) Galleri Andersson/Sandstrom (Stockholm, SE) and Olle Nymans Ateljeer (Stockholm, SE). Selected group exhibitions include Eric Firestone Gallery (East Hampton, NY), Orwells Garden (Brooklyn, NY), Sarah Shephard Gallery (Larkspur, CA) Platform Project Space, (Brooklyn, NY), Bienvenue Steinberg & J (New York, NY) Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art (NY), CRG Gallery (New York, NY), PS122 (New York, NY), Sharon Arts Center (Peterborough, NH), Dunkers Kulturhus (Helsingberg, SE) and Gana Art Space (Seoul, Korea). Gildersleeve was a 2018-2019 recipient of The Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program in Brooklyn, NY. She has been twice awarded the NYFA Fellowship in Painting. She has been an artist resident at Yaddo, the Millay Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, the Liquitex International Research Residency in London, the Norman Bird Sanctuary in Newport RI and Pouch Cove Foundation in Newfoundland, Canada. Born in New London, Gildersleeve lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Opening Reception
Friday, October 10 • 5 – 7 PM
Members Free • Non-members $10
RSVP to 860.443.2545 or [email protected].