Ellen Miller Gallery is pleased to welcome two accomplished Boston artists: Meg Alexander and Isabel Riley. Alexander and Riley have extensive exhibition history in the Boston area and a wide collector base. It is an honor and a pleasure to be working with such talented women and look forward to exhibiting their work in the very near future.

"Meg Alexander holds time in her drawings. For many years, her subject matter has been elements of nature that manifest the seasonal transformations around us every day, yet her works defy easy categorization as still life or nature studies. Alexander’s attention to these forms pulls them from the stream of time. Each drawing materializes a complexity beyond the simple substance of ink and paper, to offer layered observations about memory, absence, and eternity.

Alexander constructs the entire blossom from the absence of ink—the brightest whites are only the pure paper—and her skill at building form out of darkness establishes the contradiction at the heart of the series. The flower alone exists in the sunny brilliance of midday, while the leaves exist in the deep shadows of dusk or nighttime. Despite its near photographic precision, the drawing defies the temporal logic of an instantaneous snapshot and instead collapses the long hours of the day into a super-natural depiction of presence." Rachael Arauz

Isabel Riley’s paintings channel the language of the subconscious, carving space between the physical world and the unseen. Sites of both invention and excavation, the surfaces are actively built up and scrubbed down as the artist searches for dynamic color combinations and rhythms within abstract forms. Riley allows the works to develop through the freedom of instinct, working in the spirit of Surrealism and André Breton’s philosophy of automatic writing. Often in these works, organic networks and infrastructures emerge through geometric drawing lines, evoking spider webs and molecular structures as well as man-made systems like highways, bridges, and train routes. These networks double as foregrounded thresholds to imagined landscapes; windows that simultaneously obscure, fragment, and reveal what lies beyond. Enchantment arises in these liminal moments as the viewer stands with one’s feet in reality while peering into the depths of a dream space.