Corrie Slawson: A desert of magnificence... (a glittering waste of laborious idleness.)

CORRIE SLAWSON

A desert of magnificence... (a glittering waste of laborious idleness.)

September 26 – November 20, 2015

SHAHEEN is delighted to open its Fall season with “A desert of magnificence,” an exhibition of new and ambitiously scaled works on paper by Cleveland-based artist Corrie Slawson. The exhibition will be Slawson’s first at SHAHEEN. There will be an opening reception for the artist on Saturday, September 26th from 6:30-8:30pm. The exhibition will continue thru November 20th.

The title for Slawson’s exhibition at SHAHEEN is taken from a quote by the 19th century art critic William Hazlitt who, in the course of critiquing England’s famed Baroque-era palace, Fonthill Abbey, proclaimed that it was “a desert of magnificence, a glittering waste of laborious idleness.” In addition to providing the title for the exhibition, Hazlitt’s quote also offers a thematic primer for the artist’s work. Slawson’s complex and layered compositions and the imagery that populates them derive from her everyday commuter travels through Cleveland’s urban and suburban landscape, which are largely dictated and conditioned by her various roles as a worker with a day job, mother who shuttles her son from place to place, and full-time artist. Much like Hazlitt’s assessment of Fonthill Abbey, the Cleveland that emerges from the photographs that Slawson habitually snaps throughout her daily journeys is often one of vacancy and decay.... buildings, neighborhoods and vistas once vibrant during the city’s gilded age of unchecked wealth and growth that have long since plummeted into a state of disrepair due to suburban migration and dwindling urban population.

Realized through her deft and versatile utilization of a broad range of materials and technical processes, including printmaking, drawing, painting, spray-painting, and application of metal leaf, Slawson’s photo-based images and the complexly layered compositions into which she incorporates them constitute a fantastical re-imagining of Cleveland’s once-vibrant urban expanses. Alternately dense and sparse, the macro and microscopic city landscapes that emerge both in and as her work are characterized by innovative revisions to traditional printmaking processes, intricate hand rendering, brilliant shots of spray paint, and Byzantine passages of gold leaf; at once solemn and optimistic, Slawson’s work reflects on space, remnants of the built form and the intention of the present condition. In addition to her continued visual inquiry into Cleveland’s landscape, Slawson’s exhibition will include works that mirror her movement through new spaces. Through opening up alternative visions of and paying homage to other underdog places that she has visited recently, such as Tijuana and Dresden, the artist sharpens her ability to articulate and re-imagine Cleveland’s timeline and her own daily surroundings.

Corrie Slawson's work has appeared in numerous solo and group gallery and museum exhibitions in the United States and abroad, including The Sculpture Center, SPACES and Zygote Press in Cleveland, OH, as well as Centro Cultural Tijuana (Tijuana, BC, Mexico), Toledo Art Museum (Toledo, OH), and Galerie Standenhaus (Dresden, Germany). The artist's works reside in the collections of The Cleveland Clinic, The Westin Hotel, University Hospitals of Cleveland, Ohio Arts Council and Zygote Press. Slawson lives and works in Cleveland Heights, OH and received her BFA from Parsons School of Design and MFA from Kent State University.