Ampersand is pleased to present Sanctuary House, a solo exhibition of new work by Alec Egan. Constructing a fictitious nostalgia that relies on notions of American domestic life, his ongoing series of paintings examines the inner workings of the “household”, especially one that is populated in adolescence.

At center are two thickly painted bedroom interiors with a disheveled bed, open dresser drawers and discarded clothing and shoes. Order and symmetry are limited to the obsessively painted patterns of the wallpaper and the colorful rectangles of untitled books. The rooms seem full of lost or partially remembered details, which Egan then extracts and re-examines in subsequent paintings. The panels of a hat, for instance, play counterpoint to the lines on a wall, unbalanced books serve as a base for an angular potted plant, the pattern on a pair of socks runs askance to the floor boards on which they sit. At surface, this magnification compels the viewer to take a closer look at both the objects themselves and his or her own everyday domestic conditions. But it also hints at the inability of the painter to let go of remembered youth. The paintings, Egan notes, may thereby serve as an attempt to justify this kind of nostalgia as a valid place to live. As with all fictitious environments, however, we must question through whose eyes we are seeing these things—is it Egan himself or some other storyteller? The exhibition’s only portrait, titled Brother, features an older, bearded man seemingly entangled in Egan’s recurring floral pattern. He stares with stunned eyes and a dumfounded look at something we can’t see, but which has evidently affected him radically. Is it a room within the house to which he has returned, his sanctuary? Or some other place he has never been able to leave?

Alec Egan lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He received his MFA in 2013 from Otis College of Art and Design. The paintings in Sanctuary House will also be exhibited at the California Heritage Museum in January and will serve as basis for a book by Egan to be published by Ampersand Editions in winter, 2017. Egan’s work has been shown in group and solo shows in Los Angeles, New York, Portland and Amsterdam. His most recent exhibition was Close to Home at Freight + Volume in New York.

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Brother, 2016
Oil on canvas
60 x 48 in.