Alisa Weldon
Life Demands Both Ends

East Gallery
December 5 - January 30, 2027

Opening Reception:

Saturday, December 5, 6pm-9pm

LIFE DEMANDS BOTH ENDS, The Pencil Works by conceptual artist Alisa Weldon explores the pencil as a metaphor for the human experience.

Simple, familiar, and nearly universal, the pencil carries within it the same contradictions we encounter in life: the desire to make our mark and the need to change our minds. One end to dream; the other to start again. Between them exists everything else: the pressure, the possibility, and the marks we choose to leave behind.

Through painting, sculpture, assemblage, mixed media, and conceptual works, Weldon transforms the pencil from an everyday object into a language for examining ambition, identity, failure, joy, loss, resilience, faith, and personal growth.

A pencil begins full of possibility. It must be sharpened to become useful. It becomes shorter through experience. Its point can break under pressure. Its eraser carries evidence of decisions reconsidered. Yet even after something has been erased, a trace often remains.

So it is with us.

At the center of the exhibition is Weldon’s ongoing philosophy, “Life Demands Both Ends.” The phrase proposes that a meaningful life requires both ends: the courage to start and the grace to erase.

The works invite viewers to recognize themselves in an object they have held since childhood—and to consider their own unfinished story.
 

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Alisa Weldon is a conceptual artist whose work explores memory, meaning, and movement through layered color, texture, materials and emotion. Since 1991, she has spent decades building a career in brand development and now uses her intuition in her own artful vision. Her work originated in watercolor as a method of releasing her pixel perfection and creates with many mediums to evoke connection, reflection, and joy. Each work is a quiet invitation to pause, feel, and find the extraordinary in the everyday and in how we live life.