Negotiating Spaces, was a two-person exhibition featuring Amy Boone-McCreesh and Amber Cobb (Denver, CO). Comprising sculpture, collage works on paper, and installation, Negotiating Spaces featured each artist’s distinct approach to material and form, diverging and coalescing on aesthetic and conceptual lines. Physical space, punctuated by interior design and encased by architecture, draws attention to the people and things we surround ourselves with. Peering through curtained windows, around security bars, and past fence posts, Amy Boone McCreesh’s maximal collage and installation works consider the signifiers of class and beauty from the inside looking out. Through the use of lavish colors and textures, notions of taste-making come into question. Formed subconsciously, often inherited through one’s lineage and reinforced by architecture itself, how people design their homes and what they consider fashionable is informed by upbringing. There is an aspirational quality to McCreesh’s playful works, that spill out of their frames and onto walls with joy and defiance. By harnessing harmoniously clashing overdecoration, McCreesh subversively negates cultural markers of luxury and mass production, training an eye on the psychological and often revealing nesting instinct.

Views series:

Architecture appears to us globally in classist ways, through city planning, grand visual details and the views out of windows, manmade spaces define the humans they serve. Decorative clues, small and large, signify power and access. Small details such as Fresh flowers confirm access while a large home, beautiful views, and an expensive car flaunt power. Cultural aesthetics, passed down through families, such as color choices and fabrics in a home are often judged by others perceptions of good and bad taste. All of these aspects tell a story about socio economic positioning. These works on paper are a straight forward explorations of views, while the installation and sculptural pieces embody what it's like to be in a beautiful and maximal space. All works have the goal of questioning our level of access to beauty in our lives and the determining factors surrounding and mirroring our socio-economic status. Living in Baltimore city for over ten years, and being home-centered during the pandemic have helped shaped Boone-McCreesh’s newest View series.

Dream Sellers, a two person exhibition at Victori + Mo Gallery in New York, New York with Alex Ebstein 
Consider the life peddled to you - through pervasive cultural bias, gender stereotypes, and capitalism. The way your home looks, how you clothe yourself, access to nature and beauty. These are all topics ripe in the works of Alex Ebstein and Amy Boone-McCreesh. Dream Sellers examines the markers of success through the lens of societal pressures. Artists have long held mirrors to the worlds in which they live and Ebstein and Boone-McCreesh visually unravel what it means to exist today in a series of tactile, mixed media works. Topics including body shape preferences, advertising, slick store displays, and do- mestic life are pulled apart to question long held assumptions on class and the notion of upward mobility.
Amy Boone-McCreesh utilizes maximal aesthetics and visual tropes of grandeur in a new series that conflates window views and consumption of luxury goods. Her formative experiences growing up in a low socio-economic setting have led to further examinations of markers of success and how they manifest visually. The commodified access to beauty and nature mix with a knee-jerk opposition to notions of “good” taste in her colorful mixed-media spaces. Hand-cut collaged works on paper are informed by the labor of craft and domesticity. This is countered by the precise geometry of interior spaces and the machine-cut, synthetic materials present in the curtain-like window hangings and wall charms. Borrowing from the world she inhabits, Boone-McCreesh aspires to visually delight while questioning the prominent tastes of cultural acceptance.

Together, Alex and Amy probe at the standards and aesthetic perimeters that ensnare women, asking questions through their visual vocabularies. Mimicking the culture being sold to them, they aim to create “beauty” while testing the exclusionary limitations of the concept. The moving target of success, as it relates to the pressure to have a certain home or domestic life, fitness goals, trend conformity and other slippery milestones, tinges their work with an inescapable anxiety. Underscoring their mutual fascination with brand collaborations, limited editions and the mechanism of scarcity in art, beauty and fashion, the artists worked together to create a set of small sculptures that straddle high and low aesthetics.

This collection of works depicts hidden luxury items such as chandeliers, animal skin rugs, bags, candle sticks, and other tropes of existing in an elevated social sphere. The objects that we buy, our assumptions of “good” and “bad” taste, the view out of our windows; these are all markers of social and economic status. I push against cross-cultural ideas and their associations with luxury and beauty. The work evokes ornamentation and formatting of textiles, functional objects, and domestic design. Sometimes garish color and material choices are used as a way to question visual taste. A maximal and decorative aesthetic is partnered with detailed processes often associated with craft and domesticity. 

These mixed media and collage works on paper and sculptural forms made in the last two years. With this work I aim to explore a decorative and maximal aesthetic while employing collage and efficient ways of connecting and folding paper to create organic shaped drawings. The pieces in this category are worked on both sides and then cut and folded to reveal the visual vocabulary on the back. Decisions on compositions are made as more pieces are cut and folded, creating an intuitive process that is rooted in pattern, mark-making, and heavy labor in repetitive paper cutting.

Objects of Desire is a site-specific installation featuring new works. The work in this exhibition considers the commodification of beauty; often operating as a signifier of culture and taste while widening social and economic gaps. Visual markers of taste in architecture, design, and history are utilized to poke at conceptions of luxury in Western culture. The collection of sculptural mixed media works on paper draw from domesticity and maximalist color palettes, operating somewhere between textiles, drawing, and collage. Boone-McCreesh also partnered with designer and stylist Jess Hammer to collaboratively create a series of pendant lights and to transform the gallery space.

The exhibition features an adaptation of a prior installation, The View. This piece creates a space meant to be reminiscent of looking into or out of an idyllic view. Views, in our neighborhoods and our surroundings are the thing we pay a premium for, yet the scene being viewed is ultimately free. Our surroundings, domestic and geographic are also an indication of access and economic structure. Naturally-inspired garlands and man-made surfaces clash in this piece to create a space that is both immersive and contained. All of the work in the show is multi-media, employing accessible materials as well as technology to further the conversation around consumption and craft.

This collection of works includes sculptural pieces that borrow from domestic, decorative, and functional objects. All of the forms and subjects aim to raise questions about what we buy, our assumptions of “good” and “bad” taste and how these are all markers of social and economic status. Many pieces incorporate the wall or utilize high relief elements as a way to connect back to the two-dimensional works and to create a larger visual vocabulary. Intense color choices and maximal decision making fuels the confrontational quality and questions of beauty and taste as it operates culturall and historically. 

Taste and Privilege was a site-specific exhibition installed at the Cora Miller at York College in Pennsylvania in the fall of 2017. The exhibition contains works on paper, sculpture, custom-seating, and installation. Through this visual vocabulary the show aims to question the roles of privilege in visual taste and the culture of "good" and "bad" taste. The exhibition is sectioned into "rooms" by color and media, culminating in an installation on the back wall titled "The View". Viewers are invited to sit on custom ottomans to look "out" into the space beyond the interior of the gallery. This piece is intended to bring light to what we consider to be of value in our daily lives, one for most is a view of the outdoors, a space which is free. When buying property or reserving a hotel room, the view often comes at a premium.
The exhibition as a whole dances around the idea of aesthetic taste and the way it forms culturally. Maximal installations and works on paper, as well as sculptural forms and intense color combinations are the primary vehicles for the show. 

Three-dimensional works on cut paper with mixed media, found objects. Created between 2015 and 2017. This body of works aims to continue my exploration of fusing two and three dimensional works while referencing decoration and the development of abstract spaces. The nature of decorative objects and spaces tend to be highly ornate with details on top of details, these are elements I have incorporated into my visual language. 

These exhibitions feature site-specific constructions that combine two and three dimensional mixed media with vibrant collections of paper, textiles, found objects, and digital processes. The work is celebratory and exuberant, expressing the human impulse to push spatial and imagistic boundaries. The vinyl patterns in both installations were created specifically for these spaces and  were made from imagery borrowed from previous works on paper using digital collage manipulation processes. 

Site-specific installation at Hamiltonian gallery in Washington DC during May/June of 2014:
Anything Sacred was an exploration of my celebratory aesthetic combined with formal design elements. The exhibition is an immersive installation with a preponderance of 2D and 3D visual media. The work covered the walls and floors, and was filled with patterns culled and re-mixed from past bodies of work: previously created drawings, paintings and collages were scanned, cut, re-pasted and combined. The result was a temple to visual excess: a colorful, maximal experience that immerses visitors fully in the visual lexicon through painting, sculpture and drawing. A look at self referential imagery and the malleability of meaning once an image is once or twice removed from it's origin.