Vision

The Cincinnati Arts Association’s Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery in the Aronoff Center for the Arts debuts three new exhibitions on December 17 featuring regional artists: Vision: Things That Fly/Site-Specific Installation by Elissa Morley, a magical landscape world of translucent drawings and suspended ethereal forms by Elissa Morley; Utopia: Paintings and Works on Paper by Todd Reynolds, the dreamlike and somewhat disturbing large-scale paintings and watercolors of Todd Reynolds; and Movement, Chance, Light: Abstract Photographs by Diana Duncan Holmes, a new series of evocative abstract photographs by Diana Duncan Holmes. 

Inspired by ancient, medieval and contemporary mystical writings, Elissa Morley’s (Lexington, Ky.) installations reveal a place of purification and healing filled with intricate ceremony and ritual. She seeks to create a relationship to a transcendent realm through architectural structure, decorative pattern and hybridized landscape. Capitalizing on the transparency of the Weston Art Gallery’s street-level exhibition space window-walls, Morley will transform a series of ground-level windows with beautiful watercolor paintings on translucent vellum that transmit natural and artificial light. These luminous panels allow for both interior and exterior viewing. Complementing these paintings and filling the interior volume of the space, a number of suspended veil-like drawings suggesting architectural forms will frame another set of ethereal floating forms drifting above the viewer’s head. 

Elissa Morley earned a bachelor’s degree in art from Asbury College in Wilmore, Ky., in 1998 and a master of fine arts in painting from The Slade School of Fine Art at University College London, London, England in 2001. She furthered her studies at Goldsmiths College at the University of London, London, England where she received a postgraduate certificate in education in 2004. 

She has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Kentucky and Florida, and internationally in London, England. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Asbury College Art Gallery in Wilmore, Ky., and Unit Two Gallery in Lexington, Ky. In 2010, she received an Individual Artist Grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women. She currently serves as an adjunct professor of art at Eastern Kentucky University. 

download Elissa's Statement Panel 

Gallery Talk Series: Saturday, February 5 at 2 p.m.

Families Create! Education Workshop: Saturday, February 5 at 10 a.m.