Ali Vaughan: Angle of Repose

September 20th - November 23rd

Reception: September 20th, 6 - 8 pm 

RAM is delighted to announce “Angle of Repose,” a solo exhibition by Richmond-based artist Ali Vaughan. This exhibition signifies Vaughan’s inaugural solo showcase with RAM and will include a collection of new paintings, drawings, and sculptural works.

“The term Angle of Repose suggests both stillness and maximum tension. It refers to the steepest possible angle at which loose earth can rest before collapsing to gravity. The term also references Wallace Stegner's novel of the same name, which I consider a profound meditation on what it means for one person to understand another across space and time. 

I like to think of this work as “pictures of places.” Place is not landscape or geography, city or town, location or coordinates. It is real, imaginary, both, and neither, as much subject to memory and emotion as it is to latitude and longitude. 

The work is based on process. I started each piece without an endpoint in mind, instead laying down scratches, drawings, or gestures and responding to them as I went along. Each work had to get lost before its place could be found. Through the discomfort and tension of not knowing where things would end up, ultimately, I arrived somewhere. I’d like to think of each piece, each arrival, as its own Angle of Repose; fleeting moments of coalescence and understanding, available only thanks to reckoning with precarity.”

Ali Vaughan is an artist based in Richmond, California. She was born and raised in Bakersfield, California, and received dual BA degrees in Art Practice (with Honors) and Art History from Stanford University in 2019. She regularly works between mediums of oil painting, drawing, and sculpture. Through process-based abstraction, her work examines notions of place and identity.

Artist Talk: October 19th at 10:30 am