Silicone Mixed Media

In the series of paintings titled “That Feeling When,” Aldrich expands the excess of materials to large figure paintings and small, overfilled sculptures. Aldrich uses thick materials that protrude from the surface, reminding the viewer that the paintings are not only physical objects in themselves, but also create the illusion of the picture. The work employs a risky excess of material that borders on uncontrollable; becoming metaphoric for barely controlled femininity, the attraction and repulsion of materialism, and the body pressing against constraints. The figures in the paintings are seen from behind or have turned away. The viewer is put in a place of questioning whether they are a voyeur or a co-viewer with the figure of something deeper in the picture plane. The full body paintings of young women based on Nancy Drew...

This mixed media painting, titled "Sleeping Adonis” is a textural rendering of a figure resting in a sprawling hammock. The piece consists of oil paint, enamel, silicone, caulking, and found transfers on canvas. Our subject, Adonis (a reference to the handsome young man in Greek mythology), is pressed tightly against the hammock and with the help of gravity, his skin squeezes and pokes out playfully between the webs of the hammock strings. The palpable weight of the sleeping boy...

A feminine figure reclines in a pink and blue-strapped hammock. The figure sitting in the hammock is activated by Aldrich’s transformation of paint and silicone into layered, glistening, and oozing swaths of skin. The hammock, recalling the grid, works as a pattern trying to hold and contain the body resting inside it. -- Building on her previous show, Main Squeeze, which featured bodies pressing through the grid of lawn chairs, in “That Feeling When,” Aldrich expands the excess of materials to large figure paintings and small, overfilled sculptures. Aldrich uses thick materials that protrude from the surface, reminding the viewer that the paintings are not only physical objects in themselves, but also create the illusion of the picture. The work employs a risky excess of material that borders on uncontrollable; becoming metaphoric for barely controlled femininity, the attraction and repulsion of materialism, and the body pressing against constraints. The figures in the paintings are seen from behind or have turned away. The viewer is put in a place of questioning whether they are a voyeur or a co-viewer with the figure of something deeper in the picture plane. The full body paintings of young women based on Nancy Drew...

Eleanor Aldrich’s mixed media painting “Cast Shadow” is a textural rendering of a figure resting in a hammock swing. Made of oil, enamel, silicone, and c...