The Art League Gallery Presents Andrea Cycyk Wild Suburbia

The Art League Gallery presents the August 2022 Open Exhibit and Wild Suburbia, by Andrea Cycyk. Both are on view through September 4.

Diverse works in different mediums are the feature of Open Exhibits at The Art League. Ninety-eight artworks including painting, drawing, photography, mixed media, sculpture, collage, glass, printmaking, and fiber art are in this month’s show. It was juried by Philadelphia-based glass artist Amber Cowan.

Andrea Cybyk, the August solo artist, finds beauty in the scourge of gardeners everywhere: common weeds. Wild Suburbia celebrates these botanical outcasts—from the petite and humble to the huge and invasive—that thrive in sidewalk cracks, abandoned fields, gravelly roadsides, and other forgotten spaces. In Cybyk’s colorful artworks—a combination of painting and printmaking—these uninvited garden guests appear wondrous.

Wild Suburbia by Andrea Cybyk celebrates the simple beauty of common weeds, the uninvited guests of the botanical world. From petite and humble to huge and invasive, weeds thrive in forgotten spaces – cracks in the sidewalk, abandoned fields and gravelly roadsides. These awkward outsiders in our culture of carefully manicured suburban landscapes are resilient, determined and surprisingly sculptural in form.

The work combines painting and monotype processes and ranges from small and intimate to tall and lanky pieces executed in acrylic paint on both paper and Duralar polyester film. The longest of these – 6 to 8 feet – are suspended from overhead cables so they rotate 360 degrees. The centerpiece of the exhibit is Abundant Field, a 3-dimensional installation of 7 paintings the artist describes as “overlapping memories from hundreds of walks” in her suburban neighborhood and beyond.  Secured only at the top, each piece hangs freely at the bottom, fluttering slightly with the airflow of the room and allowing light to penetrate the frosted translucent Duralar.  Cybyk uses this translucency to full advantage, working on both sides of the film to build wild, layered compositions of positive shapes and negative spaces from the plants she encounters

The Art League Gallery in Studio 21 is located at 105 North Union Street, Alexandria, VA.