About the Exhibition

Alicia Piller: 2020 Visions

Main Gallery, Mentry Hall 108
October 18 – December 10, 2021

Artist in Residence: November 15, 2021 and November 18, 2021

Artist Talk: February 26th, 2:30pm - view link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDOh64xtiww

This exhibition on view in the COC Art Gallery presents a series of works Piller created, as the title suggests, in the year 2020 -- a year marked by the COVID-19 pandemic, lost lives, racial justice protests, gun violence, economic upheaval, political turmoil, and surging activism. Piller’s works chronicle the painful and disrupting events and challenging realities of 2020; and reflect the artist’s own attempts to process and reconcile these experiences.

Merging new, discarded, unconventional, and often marginalized materials, Piller creates mixed media works that strive to actualize the unseen energy around objects or events, most recently examining the wounds left by historical traumas. With 2020 Visions, Piller grapples with our present moment. Masks are everywhere—layered, embedded, and suspended just slightly above our heads. They reference a now familiar part of pandemic life, and they remember the faces, feelings, and tragic headlines that permeated our existence.

Alicia Piller was born and raised in Chicago and received her undergraduate degree in both Painting and Anthropology from Rutgers University in 2004. For more than a decade she worked in the fashion industry in New York and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Piller went on to earn her MFA , focused on sculpture and installation, from the California Institute of the Arts in 2019. Her work has been exhibited widely throughout the US, and can be found in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum at UCLA and Glendale College, as well as several private collections.
This exhibition and artist lecture are made possible by the support Associated Student Government, Dr. Jasmine Rhys and the Student Equity and Achievement Program.

For more information about the artist and her work visit: https://www.aliciapiller.com/