July 12th - August 24th 2024
Gallery Hours: 24/7
miniMAC (miniature Mount Airy Contemporary)
25 West Mt. Airy Avenue, Philadelphia PA 19119
www.mountairycontemporary.com
miniMAC is pleased to announce Landscapes Within, an exhibition of works by Alyssa Fanning and Cecilia Whittaker-Doe. Both painters explore landscape as a medium for connecting to the natural world, either for exploration of the self or of the universe around us.
Alyssa Fanning says of her work, “Returning to oil paint for the first time in ten years, blue skies have rolled in, signifying clarity and optimism. Rounded forms of repeated hills reflect a dream-like, harmonious existence. Pockets of imagery populate the spaces creating texture and complexity. These ‘scenes within scenes’ hint at the connection between the cosmic and microcosmic worlds that reside within us and around us. My paintings depict euphoric spaces filled with joyful color and clear light. Clouds, trees, and spheres fill the surfaces. Trees appear as solid forms on terrestrial mounds, as transparencies, and inside globes and clouds. Are they flying away? Are we dreaming them?”
Cecilia Whittaker-Doe’s paintings are derived from experience and observation in the natural landscape. She says, “Within the inquisitive act of painting these experiences prompt an exploration of self amid the sometimes tumultuous relationship depicted between air, water and land. The presence of a weed, muddy and rocky earth, or a flower in the landscape takes on as much importance as any scene alluded to and metaphors are found in the desire for discovery in painting. Posing questions in a painting is important to me. I’d rather a viewer experience more curiosity than answers from my painting.”
Alyssa Fanning was born in 1985 in Teaneck, NJ. A graduate of Pratt Institute (BFA) and Montclair State University (MFA), Fanning has exhibited at AC Institute, New York, NY; the Glass House, New Canaan, CT; Newark Museum, Newark, NJ, Platform x David Zwirner, New York, NY; and Teckningsmuseet, Laholm, Sweden, among others. Recent solo exhibitions by the artist include A Thousand Moons and Suns at Platform Project Space, Brooklyn, NY and Alyssa Fanning: Drawings at Carlton Hobbs, New York, NY. She presented a new body of work this summer in the two-person exhibition, Alyssa Fanning & Kristin Cronic, at Pocket Utopia Gallery, New York, NY. Fanning has been published in Battery Journal, BOMB Magazine, Hyperallergic, Peer Review, and Two Coats of Paint. Her curatorial projects include exhibitions at ABC No Rio, New York, NY; Eagle Studio, Brooklyn, NY; and Radiator Gallery, Queens, NY. In 2024 she launched the artist lecture series, Show&Tell Art Talks, with artists Michael Aaron Lee and Patrick Neal, in Long Island City, NY. Fanning teaches drawing and design at Montclair State University in Montclair, NJ and Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ. In 2022 she received the Distinguished Teaching Faculty Award at Stevens Institute of Technology.
More about Fanning’s work can be found at www.alyssaefanning.com.
Cecilia Whittaker-Doe is a painter living and working in Brooklyn, NY, and Delaware County, NY. In addition to making and exhibiting her paintings, Whittaker-Doe, along with her husband, Don Doe, directed SRO Gallery, an alternative artist run space in Crown Heights, Brooklyn from 2016-2019.
Whittaker-Doe has shown widely throughout NYC and upstate NY, and her work is included in many private collections. Selected exhibitions include Further in Summer than the Birds Platform Project Space, Brooklyn, NY (curated by Jennifer Coates), Amor Mundi, Hurley Gallery Princeton University, NJ (curated by Su Friedrich), Not Belonging To The Place You Have Arrived At, NHFPL Gallery New Haven, CT (catalogue with essay by Archie Rand available upon request), Portrait of a Forest, Art Mora gallery, Ridgfield Park, NY, Art For Your Collection, Catherine Fosnot Gallery, New London, CT, Re-Ordering of Place, Upstairs Gallery at Hudson Beach Glass, Beacon, NY, Bocage, Flow/Glow, Landx, Red Fox art gallery, Pound Ridge, NY, Dandelions, 490 Atlantic Brooklyn, NY, Water Works Walter Wickiser Gallery NY, NY, Natural Impact Arsenal Gallery, Central Park NY, To You, The View To Me (two person exhibit with Don Doe) The Upstairs Gallery, Hudson Beach Glass Beacon, NY (catalog available upon request).
More about Whittaker-Doe’s work can be found at www.ceciliawhittakerdoe.com.
miniMAC is a project of MAC (Mount Airy Contemporary). MAC has been curating shows in northwest Philadelphia since 2009.
