The Philadelphia Art Alliance at University of the Arts is pleased to present one-person exhibitions by Gracie Devito, Merlin James and Gabriel de la Mora that revolve around a new sensibility of abstracted landscape. These three global artists have never exhibited in Philadelphia before. Each has arrived at these works from individualized tactics that variously confront the history of representation while acknowledging the materiality and construction of images. 

The paintings of Merlin James are also subtly radical in their own terms. His personal color sensibility is at times solemn, at others brightly exuberant. He works on a variety of surfaces whose textures have a great effect on his paint touch and attack. In some works, the stretcher bars may be visible through translucent supports. In other paintings, the outside contour of the canvases bows away from traditional rectangular modes. James often physically pierces the picture plane with the negative space punctuating towards pictorial ends. Neither wholly figurative nor adverse to abstraction, James, in effect, advances Western representational canon while deconstructing its illusionist heritage.

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