The Bolsky Gallery is pleased to present strange sister, a thesis exhibition by Alicia Serling.
In this exhibition Serling investigates the historical gaze of witchcraft and its inherent relationship to feminism by creating loaded artifacts. She does so by crafting forms that reference a lineage of ritual practices that relate to the healing power of magic. These devices teeter on the line between both worlds, magic and art, to create boundary objects. The works approach and distill devastating topics like domestic violence, rape culture, the psychological effects of gender-based traumas, and the rights of female-identifying bodies. The exhibition ultimately speaks to the desire to heal and reclaim the power that stems from narratives that are shared by a multitude of individuals.
strange sister culminates in a variety of effigies from sculptural assemblages to collage-like found text drawings. Each piece in the show draws upon certain identifiable items: zip ties, matches, text, pills, ropes, wax, jars, and many more. Serling’s work takes these items and correlates them to a corresponding craft in magic to express their state of being. The works emerge with a sense of soft anguish and become both beautiful and perverse upon viewing. Through this work, she aims to leave room for associations, discussions, and ultimately a somatic conclusion in the viewer.
strange sister is a play on the name of the characters in Shakespeare’s Macbeth; The Three Witches, Wayward Sisters, Wyrd Sisters, or Weird Sisters. These witch characters have been adapted and interpreted by various cultures and directors. They were dramatized and hyperbolized to the greatest extent. Being made into the strangest of the strange, operating on the outskirts to be agents of fate.
Alicia Serling (b. 1988, Southfield, Michigan) is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, California. She received a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art (Baltimore, MD) in 2011. She will complete her MFA at Otis College of Art and Design in the spring of 2022.
