Tiger Strikes Asteroid Philadelphia is pleased to present Iconologies, an exhibition featuring the work of Anne Buckwalter, Mae Alphonse Dessauvage and Zachary Simonson. These artists were chosen from a pool of nearly 350 applicants to our 2019 Open Call.

Inspired by traditions of allegorical painting, Anne Buckwalter explores female identity and the coexistence of contradictions. She arranges disparate objects in ambiguous rooms and uncanny spaces. Subjects of the female body, intimacy, and gender roles are woven through paradoxical and obscure narratives in Buckwalter’s paintings.

Anne Buckwalter received a BFA from the Tyler School of Art in 2010 and an MFA from the Maine College of Art in 2012. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Hewnoaks Artist Colony, and the Vermont Studio Center. In 2016, she received an Emerging Artist Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Her paintings have been featured in New American Paintings, The Jealous Curator, and Create Magazine, and her work has been exhibited in Boston, Montréal, Toronto, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, New York, and Rome, among other cities. She currently lives and works in Galveston, Texas, as a 2019-2020 artist-in-residence at the Galveston Artist Residency.

Mae Alphonse Dessauvage plays with crises of meaning in iconography. Her work looks to icons as found objects. She dislocates them from their time and place, and re-defines them through the visual language of cartooning to create new intimate narratives. Rather than depicting biblical cycles, these narratives represent conflicts in sexuality and identity through the recurring figure of the angel. These ambiguous figures investigate artifacts of the past that are abstracted, at once mysterious and banal. The artist treats these objects as an armature to explore cultural dysphoria and anxieties about history and identity.

Mae Alphonse Dessauvage is a painter living and working in New York, NY. She received her B.A. from Columbia University in 2017 and M.Arch at The Harvard Graduate School of Design. Recent exhibitions include a two-person show entitled “Object of Memory” at Kirkland Gallery, as well as solo shows at Gallery Madison Park and BAAA Gallery entitled “Figures and Objects”.

Zachary Simonson’s works depict a romantic world that houses patterns of thinking. Using isometric projection as a framework, these paintings are systems for processing and organizing memory and longing. Simonson builds an architectural landscape from observation and invention. These spaces are occupied by thoughts, people and objects in the form of symbolic characters, much like how a key is used on a map. These inhabitants are simultaneously a notational system to analyze the details of his own experience and narrative devices.

Zachary Simonson was born in Wisconsin, where he received his BFA in Painting from the University of Wisconsin Whitewater. He currently lives and works in Philadelphia, where he received his MFA from The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Recent group exhibition venues include Pentimenti Gallery (Philadelphia, PA), The Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY) and Anna Zorina Gallery (New York, NY).