Alisa Sikelianos-Carter
A Spell is a Map to What is Meant for You
September 13 – October 30, 2022
Fridman Gallery is honored to present A Spell is a Map to What is Meant for You, the first solo exhibition with the gallery by Alisa Sikelianos-Carter, exploring connections among ancestry, power, intuition, and the divine. The artist’s mixed-media works on paper are akin to spells commanding the viewer to engage closely with the various textures – hard ground, velvety gouache, glittery mica, and other luminescent materials – mapping the diversity of the color black and of the Black experience.
Sikelianos-Carter creates devotional objects which embed within them the physical knowledge of ancestral DNA, and the spiritual knowledge passed up and down through generations. Like asteroids arriving to a future pulsating with energy of the world left behind, these are maps of celestial and human bodies that tell stories of survival and transcendence into a new world of unceasing freedom and protection.
I am the asteroid and the asteroid is me…
Works
Exhibition Programming
Opening Reception • September 13, 2022
Alisa Sikelianos-Carter earned her BA and MA in Painting and Drawing from SUNY Albany. She is a recent NXTHVN Fellow, a 2022 Headlands Artist in Residence, and in 2021 was awarded the inaugural fellowship at Foreland, a six-month studio residency in the Catskills conferred biennially on an outstanding artist of color. Recent exhibitions of her work include Realms of Refuge, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL; Un/Common Proximity, James Cohan, New York, NY; In the Eye of Belonging, Mandeville Gallery, Union College, Schenectady, NY; and Never Done: 100 Years of Women in Politics and Beyond, Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY. Sikelianos-Carter was featured in New American Paintings, No. 146, Northeast Issue, and received the Sustainable Arts Foundation Grant. She has been awarded residencies at the Millay Arts, Austerlitz, NY; Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT; Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY; Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY; Fountainhead Residency, Miami, FL and Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA.