Full Sun - Allison Lacher
September 21 - October 20, 2018
Full Sun brings us into a space of chromatic heat and dreamlike, lulling energy. Both inside and outside, we are exposed to the warmth of the sun but enclosed by a familiar room: windows, lamps, the protections of domesticity. Huge flowers grow beneath our feet as if we were on the floor of a giant forest.
The installation considers the seductive trance induced by sunlight—both literally and as an abstraction—and the likelihood of our slowly overheating. The barred windows serve not to reveal but to conceal what lies beyond our temporary comfort. Our pleasure is also our prison.
This is not just our collective ecological experience, but the private experience of that which sustains us emotionally: in relationships as in ecology, too much of a good thing threatens to overwhelm us. The exhibition questions how we choose to inhabit such tenuous situations, creating room for the playfulness and delight of Full Sun, while hinting at an eventual tipping point.
Allison Lacher is an artist and curator based in Springfield, Illinois. Subjects from domestic and suburban life — lamps, utensils, windows, kites, dogs — appear frequently in her work. They act as a prism for complex emotional states, the kind that silently shape our experience of everyday settings. Daydreaming, love, discomfort, longing, and fantasy all pervade ordinary life; the work reflects the bracing presence of these forces within the subdued atmosphere of homes, rooms, and neighborhoods.
Her work has been exhibited at venues that include E. TAY Gallery (New York, NY), the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art and CUAC Contemporary (Salt Lake City, UT), PDX Contemporary (Portland, OR), The Luminary and Museum Blue (St. Louis, MO), Roman Susan (Chicago, IL), Ski Club (Milwaukee, WI), Future Tenant of Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA), the Terrain Biennial (Oak Park, IL), Center for Contemporary Art (Hammond, LA), Grounds for Sculpture (Hamilton, NJ) and Illinois State University Galleries (Normal, IL).
Allison has received artist residency awards from Ox-Bow, ACRE, Spiro Arts, Vermont Studio Center, The Luminary, the Prairie Center of the Arts, and with Signal Fire where she spent time living and working on US/Mexico borderlands. She was a HATCH Projects curatorial resident with the Chicago Artists Coalition and is a previous recipient of the Illinois Arts Council Fellowship Award. Her work has been profiled on Arts Across Illinois (WTTW Chicago PBS), featured in NewCity (Chicago), FLOOR Magazine (London), Temporary Art Review, and in From Here to There published by Princeton Architectural Press.
In 2013 she Co-founded DEMO Project, a space for contemporary art in Springfield, and served as Co-director of the space until its demolition in early 2018. She works at the University of Illinois Springfield where she teaches in the Art, Music and Theater Department and also serves as the Exhibitions Manager at the UIS Visual Arts Gallery.
