Sean Foley paints fantastic, surreal images that straddle the worlds of representation and imagination, snakes and puppies, magic and monsters. Foley’s paintings seem to fall into the unique category of "animated abstraction" in that they can be viewed as some obscure "thing" that seems like it must exist, even though you are not quite able to name what it is you are looking at.

For Foley’s first one-man show at Allston Skirt Gallery, he will create an installation that centers around a giant wall piece made up of puzzle pieces that highlight the artist’s interest in games, playfulness, and also in the pleasures and pains of uncertainty, and how they interact with the visual and the optical. He raises questions about what we can and cannot know, and how we mentally process what we see, or think we see. Called "Phantasmagoria," this sprawling work involves the gallery as a viewing environment, and brings up many issues which are central to Foley’s painting.

Foley, who chairs the painting department at Maine College of Art in Portland, intentionally mixes styles in this show, to explore ideas of the grotesque and the monstrous through forced pairings of conflicting presentations and stylistic schisms, and by generating composite forms where figurative imagery becomes abstracted. Besides the large puzzle work, Foley will show paintings and drawings that showcase the breadth of his imagination for inventive imagery, as well as his impressive skill with color and paint.

Danielle Dwyer paints in oil on postage stamps, capturing snapshot moments that are at the same time personal and generic, individual and collective. She describes herself as being primarily concerned with documentation, with photography and the role it plays in our lives. Dwyer is interested in how we look at photographs to aid our perception of our lives, and how photography points up the fragility of our memory and the fleeting quality of our actual experience of events. By painting on stamps, she references the mass-produced images that commemorate our shared historical iconography. These paintings, however, are paying tribute to a personal history that is not shared but rather is individual, and that is ordinary, not extraordinary.

ALLSTON SKIRT GALLERY is located at 450 Harrison Avenue, #303, Boston, MA. We are open Wednesday - Saturday, from 11 a.m. - 5 p.m. For more information, please call Randi Hopkins or Beth Kantrowitz at 617-482-3652.

www.allstonskirt.com