Angela Fraleigh: The Raving Ones
Past Exhibitions, Art Fairs & Off-site Projects exhibition
Installation
Selected Works
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The gallery is pleased to announce a special project by American painter Angela Fraleigh. The Raving Ones is a 28 foot painting installation presenting three major (78 x 57 inch) paintings on hand-drawn wallpaper.
“Show me your witches and I’ll show you your feelings about women” — Pam Grossman
“The witch is a shapeshifter. She transforms from vixen to hag, healer to hellion, adversary to advocate, based on who seeks her… The witch is at once female divinity, female ferocity, and female transgression. She is all and she is one. Most of all, she is misunderstood.” — Kristen J. Sollee
Artist Angela Fraleigh has spent her career exploring narrative art’s hierarchical patterns. Keenly observing how images and roles from Western art history intersect with contemporary representation and attitudes, Fraleigh uncovers why certain tropes remain relevant, who they benefit, and how. Over the last decade she has worked with institutions to create several site-specific solo exhibitions that reveal alternative accounts in their permanent collections. In rearranging the images of the past, the artist transforms how we see ourselves in the present.
In this new series Fraleigh draws parallels between art production and spellcraft, harnessing the magic of making the invisible, visible. Ecstatic Maenads gather amongst a frenzied tangle of medicinal herbs and serpents to raucously summon the powers of mythical female figures such as: Artemis, Hecate and Medusa to aid in casting a spell.
The work is part archaeological romp through representation, featuring goddesses in both their celebrated and reviled forms; and part reclamation, as it shifts the lens to reveal a more complex, diverse history. They are layered with magical signifiers and enchanted materials like crystals, moon water, and color magic. Each work is blessed and accompanied by a custom spell for Self-Sovereignty written by professional witch, Pam Grossman.
Each painting serves as a kind of spell — one that disrupts, re-imagines, and re-signifies the female characters from familiar tales so as to challenge our perceptions of the past and experience a different future.
Special thanks to Ted Holland and Hirschl & Adler Modern.
Angela Fraleigh earned her MFA from Yale University School of Art and her BFA from Boston University. Fraleigh has created site-specific solo projects for the Edward Hopper House Museum, the Vanderbilt Mansion Museum, the Everson Museum of Art, the Delaware Art Museum and the Weatherspoon Art Museum. Her work is included in Gilded: Contemporary Artists Explore Value & Worth at the Weatherspoon Art museum; traveling to The Hood Art Museum and Hunter Art Museum. Her work can be found in museum collections such as the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and she has been the recipient of several awards and residencies including the Yale University Alice Kimball English grant, The Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program Brooklyn, NY, The CORE program in Houston, TX and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, NE among others. She currently lives and works in Allentown, PA, where she is Full Professor at Moravian University.
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