AMY IS HERE

                                    

       

Amy Aragon’s new works are unfolding explorations of what the artist describes as aggressive decoration: a conscious appropriation and experimentation with stylized patterns, both abstract and figurative.

Her paintings underscore how both formal and symbolic beauty can be found in ornament. Aragon first utilised dot patterns and decorative cake icing motifs for her first shows during the early 2000s, later on exploring the potentials of floral patterns and motifs, set whimsically within interior spaces, by 2006. Playfully moving forth between gesture and colour, abstraction and figuration, her current works incorporate floral imagery with elements from both imagined scenarios and documented memories: producing vividly colored scenes with a heightened, keen sense of atmosphere and place.

Amy is Here announces not just a physical revisiting by Toronto-based Aragon; it also points to the arrival within, and creation of, an interior space where one may seek wonder and solace from the world beyond. This resonates with how the artist has also faced the question of motherhood and familial relationships in her work. In her paintings, the act of representing and juxtaposing ornament, interiors and decoration is not a simply formal way of filling space, but is a gesture of nest-building: of constructing the sacred, intimate and private place of home. As a hybrid form of storage, Aragon’s paintings are filled with rich memories and mementos collected over the years, blooming with floral markers of both transience and transit.

— Lisa Ito