SHOWS CURRENT AND UPCOMING
Western New York Book Arts Center, Buffalo, NY: A Sense of Place (two-person show with Elizabeth Leader) through September 17th.
Studio Hart, Buffalo, NY: Amy Greenan: New Work through August 31st.
Houghton Gallery at 171 Cedar Arts Center, Corning, NY: Looking Out, Thinking Back through September 30th.
Steele Gallery at the Poly, Falmouth, England: Title TBD in October.
BIO
Amy Greenan (born 1970, Buffalo, NY, USA) has exhibited her paintings, drawings, prints, books, and zines internationally. Her work is included in the collections of the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, NY, the Roland Gibson Art Gallery at SUNY Potsdam, and the Spencer Art Museum in Lawrence, KS, as well as in private collections in the US, the United Kingdom, and Canada. She is a recipient of the John Hartigan Memorial Painting Scholarship for the Ox-Bow artist residency, Saugatuck, MI (2011) as well as several NYFA SOS grants (2008–2011).
In addition to her studio work in painting, Amy has also been making zines (self-published, photocopied magazines) and books as an alternate art form for over a decade. She received the Nell Meldahl Scholarship to attend the 2011 Paper & Book Intensive, a two-week long series of workshops focusing on book arts.
Greenan studied at SUNY Purchase (BFA), and the University at Buffalo (MFA). She currently works and lives in Niagara Falls, NY.
STATEMENT
I experiment with bright colors and comic book-inspired directness, with an infusion of nostalgia, confusion, and longing—recalling who I once was, places I've been to (or not), stories I've heard. I investigate little, sort of personal mysteries: those of distant family members, my own self in past incarnations, the dissolution of family and the abandonment of houses.
Woven into deceptively simple narratives, my work is sometimes injected with the absurd and surreal. I direct paint drips, write and then obscure notations. These figurative viscera, detritus, and muted voices inform my way of storytelling that may not always result in the truth or real history.
Disappointments and shortcomings are at the heart of the human experience, and heavily influence my artistic practice. Through this work I am reconstructing a past, my past, someone else's past—real or imagined, dreamed of or heard about in passing.
The house paintings have been my primary focus since early 2009, when on a whim I decided that I wanted to break away from the figure for a while. I'd been particularly attracted to this one abandoned house—the Green House, as I usually refer to it—I saw driving out to see my mother. One day, I took some photos of it, and then used those photos as a loose guide to creating the first of what ended up a long series of works.
Having grown up in what was an abandoned house when my parents purchased it, I find an irresistible affinity to these lost architectural souls. I realized, too, that the similarities between these houses and the human body and experience cannot be ignored. These places have a history in the same way we do. Memories are attached; they crumble in the same way the human body eventually does. They evoke all sorts of emotions and thoughts in me. When I paint each one, I can't help but sense that I am bringing it a bit of its life back.