Angie Piehl: Feral Beauty and Opulent Decay

November 9, 2015 - March 12, 2016

Luxury. Accumulation. Alienation from nature. These topics, considered from a gendered perspective, are what artist and OSU Associate Professor Angela Piehl invited us to explore through paintings and drawings featured in this exhibition. Using a wide range of sources, Piehl employed images and photographs of both designed and natural beauty as a starting point for abstracting and re-combining elaborately decorative, even at times grotesque, elements. References to organic materials such as flesh, hair, tentacles, eggs, fat, bone, muscle, crystalline structures, and wood appear alongside her choices of color, pattern, and textural artifice to produce what Piehl calls "feral bouquets." At once engaging and seductive, while also repellent and abject, these biomorphic abstractions address multiple layers of the human condition through their allegorical and narrative allusions.