I'm delighted to announce Windows and Barricades, my two-person show with the incredible Matthew Colaizzo. The exhibition runs through the month of February at Penn State Abington, with a public closing reception on March 1st from 1 to 2:30 PM.Hope to see you there!
Photo by Jaime Alvarez
About the Show
Windows and Barricades brings together paintings and drawings by Philadelphia-based artists Matthew Colaizzo and Julia Clift for the first time. The two met in 2020, when Clift invited Colaizzo to participate in her curatorial debut Seeing the Anthropocene, a group exhibition that took place across multiple Philadelphia venues in the fall of 2023. Windows and Barricades further develops the conversation between Colaizzo and Clift as two studio artists with shared concerns and similar formal sensibilities. Both artists explore tensions between ecology and the built environment, interrogating human desires for control in a world of entropy and impermanence. The artists also share an abiding interest in navigational and perceptual barriers. Walls, barricades, windows and screens abound in their paintings and drawings, compelling viewers to peer through filters and meager gaps, and ultimately prompting reflection on the forces that shape how we see and move about in the world. While the works in this exhibition all allude to critical issues like humankind’s hubris, Colaizzo and Clift eschew didacticism and maintain a tone of playful invention.