Crescent Tree Gallery is pleased to present Alicia Cheatham: So Far Sprung. The exhibition opens on March 2, 2024 and will run through April 30, 2024, with an opening reception on Saturday, March 2 from 6 PM to 9 PM. The reception is free and open to the public.
Alicia Cheatham’s upbringing in the Pacific Northwest provided early exposure to the philosophical tensions between the forces of nature and manufacturing, as well as the paradoxical beauty of their intersections. The conflict between environmental conservation and the logging and agriculture industries hangs in the background of her organic abstractions, which investigate the shapes and impressions offered by both natural and manipulated landscapes.
Cheatham’s paintings utilize primarily materials derived from natural sources: wood panels, oil paint, and linen. The panels on which she mounts her canvases are most often made from poplar trees, which are commonly pollarded for industrial use. Of particular interest to the artist are the scars left by the cutting or pruning of trees, a practice which can be either beneficial or destructive to the plant depending upon the intention. She blurs this imagery together with generative organic forms such as eggs, seeds, and cells, with the resulting shapes suggesting ambiguously directional apertures or portals. She cuts and shapes her surfaces using an X-Acto knife, a practice she likens to the work of a tree surgeon. Metal staples symbolically seam these incisions together in a poignantly manmade gesture of healing.
Alicia Cheatham is an artist and curator based in Pasadena, California. Since 2023 she has run a curatorial project space, Ruth Gallery, where she exhibits works by new and emerging contemporary artists. She has been invited to curate spaces at Claremont Graduate University and TRYST Art Fair, and in 2023 began collaborating internationally with B-LA-M. Her paintings have been exhibited in numerous group and solo exhibitions in the Los Angeles area, including shows at Monte Vista Projects and 515 Bendix. She studied painting and ceramics at CSU Los Angeles before earning her MFA at Claremont Graduate University.
