Amy Mayfield: Doog vs Live October 17, 2008

Known for her idiosyncratic paintings that depict ecstatic landscapes located between terrifying and medicated, fear and joy, greed and grandeur, Amy Mayfield’s paintings employ personal-world symbolism to inform fantastic landscapes. For threewalls, Mayfield has moved off the substrate, turning the gallery into a funhouse that embodies the feminine, ornate and chaotic worlds that she cultivates in her paintings.

Mayfield depicts the destruction and escape from the establishment. Employing patchwork colors, decorative black patterning, photo collage, poured paint and pins, her work resonates with Victorian decadence, part ironwork and part filigree. Mayfield’s paintings are pleasing to look at, but they don’t strike as pretty, nor are they particularly funny. Instead they conjure up beautiful and horrific decline, like aerial photos of oil slicks or waste ponds, they are a compelling disturbance. Manifest here as environments that an audience can enter and languish in, Mayfield has positioned the viewer within a psychological space that is illustrative of both driving desire and the dark grotto in which that desire is contained.

Amy Mayfield has exhibited her paintings throughout Chicago at Gahlberg Gallery, The Hyde Park Art Center, Bucket Rider and Zolla Lieberman Gallery as well as Franklin Parrasch in New York. In 2007 she exhibited in the MCA 12x12 series. Mayfield received her MFA from the The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006 where she was a recipient of several grants and scholarships.

Official Website: http://www.three-walls.org