Allison Bamcat - Fish Fingers (The Doghouse Gallery)
Allison Bamcat is a contemporary artist with an affinity for confectionary and phantoms. Through the use of acidic color, her paintings work to elicit feelings of her neon, nineties-childhood in Los Angeles, surrounded by sun-bleached, cheap plastic dolls and doodled-on stuffed toys. A menagerie of animals and creatures serve as avatars for the artist herself, assembling a series of surreal snapshots of her own personal journey, one of beautiful growth and also the simmer of trauma. With her candy-coated landscapes, there is an underlying sense of unease, whether through the piercing gaze of a voyeur parrot or in the melting and sinking of her figures. The loss of innocence and a sense of calm-among-the-chaos are feelings works to depict through the use of stark, flat fields of color against her obsessively-detailed brushwork. The velvet finish of gouache matched with her love of wood and paper leave subtle textures for her images to pop off of. She works to hypnotize her audience through her dizzying use of color and detail in her current body of acryla gouache paintings.