Kathryn Markel Fine Arts is pleased to announce hillsdale, an installation of works by Allyson Strafella. This will be her first exhibition with the gallery and will take place in the Pocket Gallery at 179 10th Avenue. An artist reception will be held on September 11 from 6-8pm.

Allyson Strafella has been drawing with a typewriter since 1992. She began drawing out of the need to communicate; to find her own language. hillsdale is a collection of drawings that reflect Strafella’s view of her surrounding landscape in Columbia County, NY.

Using a typewriter as a drawing tool, Strafella builds up repetitive punctuation marks to create forms. Working with handmade pigmented paper provides a greater resource of color and scale; carbon and transfer paper are the primary medium used to imbed those marks into paper.

Writing with a typewriter, a mechanized tool to keep up with her thoughts, she employs no rules of the written language. Strafella has, “developed marks that are my visual language: a drawing language ‘written’ by type, and a written language drawn as mark and form.” The typed images hover between the abstracted familiar, and the intimately far-away. Through the practice of drawing, she aims to clarify the complexities of the world she lives in.