For Immediate Release

 

November 2 - November 25 , 2016 

Preview : November 2-3, 11-6 pm

SITUATIONS

Mixed Media Collages by Jill Brantley

Opening Reception :

Friday November 4  6-8:30 pm

Artist In Attendance

Jill Brantley's show SITUATIONS stays true to her focus on the narrative - playfully revealing experiences that make us question real life and the world of fantasy. Brantley encourages viewers to be imaginative about...the SITUATIONS she presents. A Spider anticipating a meal in Lying In Wait, a woman and her dog blissfully dancing unaware of viewers in Like No One's Watching . In Dad's Home escaped caged birds provide jovial entertainment for the other pets in the house. In The Suitor a gentleman looks as if he’s longing for an overnight stay.  What is really going on in these SITUATIONS? That is the crux of this show. Brantley’s assemblages with paint, paper, fabric and found objects conjure generational memories such as shag rugs, plastic covered seat cushions and interior colors that travel through time and spaces bringing even the mundane to life. Each painting is a unique and sometimes humorous view of a slice of everyday life - a single act but in a different play.

Brantley has always been interested in what people’s gestures intend or what their living spaces inform about them. Her work reveals her fascination with how people embellish their bodies and surroundings and what it says about their life stories. Narratives don’t have to be told in words.

This is the artist’s first solo show at Touchstone Gallery. Her work has been shown at The Art League Gallery in Alexandria, Gallery B of The Maryland Federation of Art and The Capital Hill Art League among others. Two of her paintings were chosen to grace the cover of The Capital Hill Rag newspaper in Washington, DC - Hanky Panky for September 2014 and Bloomers for March 2016. In 2013, her painting Natalie  was chosen as a finalist in the abstract/experimental category in The Artist’s Magazine’s 30th Annual National Art Competition out of 6000 entries.

Jill Brantley resides in Alexandria, Virginia. Blest with a studio there, she devotes as much time as she can to creating her layered narratives. She says she “ strives to bring people’s attention to things they take for granted or that seem unimportant.” Brantley believes that through their artwork, artists are in a sense, keepers of history.

 

 

The Washington Post

In the galleries

By Mark Jenkins 

Jill Brantley

The title of Jill Brantley’s show at Touchstone Gallery, “Situations,” suggests annoyances and predicaments. In fact, the circumstances the Alexandria artist’s collage-paintings depict are frisky and whimsical. These pictures feature people and animals — mostly canine — having a fine old time.

Brantley incorporates scraps of fabric, most often to represent apparel such as the matching outfits worn by women and their dogs, and bits of paper and shards of mirrored glass. There’s a mop of 3-D hair on the artist in “Left to His Imagination,” who’s consulting a small picture of a clothed woman while he paints her as a nude. With their old-timey furnishings, these vignettes seem set in the past, but it’s a past redecorated by artistic imagination.

Situations: Jill Brantley On view through Nov. 27 at Touchstone Gallery, 901 New York Ave. NW. 202-347-2787. touchstonegallery.com.

 

The Capital Hill Rag

A monthly newspaper for the Capital Hill area of Washington,DC

September 2014 Cover : painting  Hanky Panky

March 2016 Cover : painting  Bloomers                                                                                                                                                  

                                                                                  

East City Art Publication in Washington, DC