FRACTURED REALITIES

Ringling Underground and Artist Liaison, Ender Wilde, present a group pop-up exhibition held in the John and Mable Ringling Museum Historic Courtyard on February 7, 2019

SAVANNAH MAGNOLIA, ANDREA MORGANSTERN, ALEISHA PRATHER

Using landscape as a platform and pulling from the need for collective escapism, artists Aleisha Prather, Savannah Magnolia and Andrea Morganstern create works that challenge environmental and social normaties. Aleisha Prather and Andrea Morganstern fragment the visual experience through their works producing confronting elements of the physical experience on both a macro and micro scale. While artist, Savannah Magnolia entices and distracts the viewer inevitably introducing a deep undertone of social discomfort. Each artist brings a particular perspective to the notion of reality, offering elemental conversations highlighting production and disruption.

Aleisha Prather fractures perception to connect to and disassociate with the surrounding landscape. This tense balance through portals offers enough information to interpret a familiar foreground while simultaneously breaking what is known, causing the unexplained which becomes magical. This magic is enhanced with the transitory opacity of the melted plastic bottles which are the lenses of the kaleidoscopes. Soft curves, specks of light and interlacing colors bounce between hollows of raw-edged branches and logs, enticing the viewer to lean in and nearly touch the surface of a new dimension.

www.aleishaprather.com @aleishapratherart

Savannah Magnolia welcomes a conversation of taboo issues of pharmaceuticals and public surveillance in a playful and approachable way. Enticing the audience with vibrant colors and exaggerated cartoons, Magnolia seamlessly melds the use of undertone and harsh realities. Magnolia's pre-med experience fostered her interest in human anatomy and manipulation of familiar anatomical elements to relate and enlighten her audience- using eyeball plants to cast light across her large-scale landscape she fills her work with an unforgiving notion of surveillance, while flying pills and teeth spiders swarm the landscape as pharmaceuticals have invaded healthcare. Understanding of the need to escape the overseeing eyes of big brother and the prescription first mentality, Magnolia has created her own language of fractured reality.

www.meltingmagnolia.com @meltingmagnolia

Andrea Morganstern presents intimate pointillist works on paper as studies representing celestial bodies, at the microscopic and cosmic levels. Through minimal compositions focusing on patterns found in nature, Morganstern depicts the ephemeral characteristics of elements found in our physical world. Creation and dissolution impact her work as she develops forms using small dots, these dots act as building blocks for solid yet fleeting forms. The overwhelming circles and crescents offer an ethereal aspect to her work, opening up discussions of the birth, ascension, and fragmentation of the physical world. Morganstern produces an impression of this continuous energy transfer, similar to the way tea grounds are left at the bottom of an empty cup.