NEW LONDON, CONN.- The Lyman Allyn Art Museum announced the upcoming exhibition Allison Gildersleeve: Here Somewhere, on view October 11, 2025 through January 18, 2026. In Gildersleeve’s richly layered paintings, time is not sequential, and location is not fixed. She deconstructs and reassembles the familiar, guided by the shifting nature of memory. Her compositions blend the monumental with the mundane, transforming landscapes and interiors into intricate visual mazes that defy fixed perspective and chronology.

Gildersleeve keeps a sketchbook of ink drawings where she reduces her surroundings into a simple iconography. This visual "alphabet" becomes the foundation for her paintings, where each object serves as a stand-in for a time, place, or memory. When these symbols converge on the canvas, they compress disparate experiences into a singular, layered timeline. Her paintings carry a sense of narrative overload, with each layer evoking the immediacy of a moment, whether it occurred an hour or a decade ago.

“I paint environments as they present themselves to me: as dynamic, ever-changing places thick with anticipation, dread, happiness, calm,” says Gildersleeve. “These are experiential landscapes — settings filled with the presence of human activity and emotion even though no people are painted within them. I use photographs I have taken in the same locale over a ten- year period as source material, but the paintings are never derived from just one take.”

A native of southeastern Connecticut, Gildersleeve was raised in a colonial farmhouse surrounded by woods. She deliberately returns to the familiar settings of her childhood — wooded areas, home interiors, open highways, and backcountry roads — to show that repeated visits to the same place invariably result in wildly divergent depictions.