Take in brand new exhibitions at The Art Studio, Inc. on the first Saturday of each month! Join us Saturday October 4th, 7-10pm to launch a new season with the opening reception for
“There are no Nests in the Pines”
by Allison Reho
in the Main Gallery
“There are no Nests in the Pines” will run concurrently with another solo exhibition in the Art Studio’s Maudee Gallery, featuring artwork by Cameron Uresti titled “Coping Mechanisms”. Both exhibitions will open on Saturday, October 4th with a public reception from 7pm until 10pm. The reception is free to attend and refreshments are provided. Both artists will be in attendance.
The artwork will be on view during TASI’s regular hours (Tuesdays through Saturdays from 12pm-5pm) until October 24th. There is no admission fee to visit The Art Studio and its galleries.
artist bio:
Allison Reho is a native to Beaumont, Texas, and resident of New Orleans for the past decade plus. While trained as a painter, her two-dimensional work verged on sculpture. Her process is one of adding and subtracting. With clay this looks like coiling, carving, painting in many layers, and multiple firings. Reho’s work captures and holds the relationships that have defined her life. Clay’s forgiving nature means that Reho can imprint and create works that are a direct impression of her physical and emotional state.
artist statement:
My first experiences with intimacy taught me to disassociate as a means of escape. When I first began to have sex, it was as a means to escape my household that held me, clenching, only to escape into more thorns and briarpatches. This reinforced even further that I could not leave freely, so I let my mind travel elsewhere. Disassociation became an instilled habit. We carry our traumas long past the abuse.
These vessels are female-bodied, encapsulating feelings and memories of the time it took to build them up, coil by coil.
I am a vessel, I knew it all along. I am a portal, the wishing well, drop your hopes and dreams down me, I can transform you, I can grow your seeds.
website: allisonreho.com
I am from Beaumont, Texas and completed a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts with emphasis in painting and ceramics at Lamar University in 2012. My best friend’s mom growing up was always in the middle of an art project on every wall, ceiling and in the garage at their house I basically lived at. Greg has always been a pillar and a mentor. Every art teacher i had from public middle school to high school was my refuge. The parties, parades and living (and so much more) in New Orleans was my continuing education.
I will be showing a body of 30 coil pots I built up and toiled over for 10 years more or less.
My work is a constant clearing, clearing out of everything I have accumulated.
I took many a college course from Xenia Fedorchenko and I really dug when she made us bleed into obsessive assignments because I could really nail my insides out. I think my work is obsessive like my personality, for better or worse, but at least it’s truthful. Also maybe a little impulsive but still calculated, patient.
Who/what are your biggest influences?
My friends, the lifers who make art their every day style, who know it transcends past all that you do but still come back to it and put that respect hand in hand- life as art.
I loved all over Mexico there are votive paintings, they hang on the walls in Frida’s house too. They are these tiny little tin paintings of a horrific, graphic event like a woman’s body ripped in half by a car wreck and her soul leaving the earth plane but then in one corner there are texts that praise whatever saint. I think they are meant to be praising but their duality is hilarious to me like how any religion or moral codes and rules mock reality. I like the faith they present to carry on.
I like the imagining of Joseph Cornell’s quaint home in Queens where he lived with his mother and family and overcollected for or in parallel to his work. How he lived an isolated life that way, but left his home occasionally to go to the ballet.
I love how Louise Bourgeois creates an actual environment for you to step into to unveil everything about how she feels discomfort. I like that she was a mother, a daughter and wife outside of her artistic career. Being a mom is really exhausting and doesn’t leave a lot of memory of formulated sentences or energy left.
I love how Alexander Calder’s circus was a performance for friends not just to be on view later in the Whitney.
Reading Carlos Fuentes makes my toes curl and me reread sentences aloud.
The stuff discarded (forgotten or not) on the ground- tumbleweaves, run-over hoop earrings, broken wooden chairs, grocery lists!
What would you like people to take away from your show?
How we build what confines ourselves too.
Nests constructed of shreds of where I once slept,
Who I thought I was
And to become.
Nests are to dwell or shelter in but also a place to take flight from.
How women are the vessels and a holy body. Women are the real homemakers.
I do not advocate for women to leave the workforce to return home and solely take care of the home and children. I just think we are doing a lot of the work, laundering the emotional loads.