By LINDSAY COSTELLO

At Never Coffee on Belmont Street, Rachel Avallone’s drawings are just visible through the large windows facing the sidewalk. The interior is small, with a narrow L-shaped walkway curving around the shop counter. Each wall is lined with Avallone’s Permission/Pleasure drawings, on view at the shop until August 15. Avallone’s works are as layered as the human psyche, and her sense of balance draws me in further with each piece. In Permission/Pleasure, Avallone pushes possibilities for visual storytelling through a dance of color and dreamlike imagery.

Permission/Pleasure consists of several larger-scale drawings on multicolored paper, hung throughout the space, alongside a series of smaller works (approx. 9” x 12”) on handmade paper, all clustered together on one wall. Avallone makes the most of the small coffee shop space and fills each wall with works. Although at first glance the drawings feel quite individual, there are a few throughlines. The large-scale works each include some form of architecture among flora and/or fauna, fostering dichotomies of structure vs. looseness. The smaller works depict playground equipment.

Avallone’s drawings grasp for memories in the forms they actually exist—jumbled, full of splashing colors and contrasting images. Like dreams, sometimes our memories only make sense to us. There is no clear narrative to Avallone’s work, and that doesn’t feel like her intention. A horse gallops near a lighthouse beacon; a key floats within a blue orb. I wonder, what will happen when these combinations of images wash over a viewer? What associations will arise? 

Avallone’s playground drawings are precise, technical in their accuracy, but are rendered on rough, handmade paper in varying muted tones. The interplay cements several visual dichotomies at play in Permission/Pleasure: fluidity vs. precision, childhood vs. adulthood, memory vs. the present, dreams vs. reality. To consider her show title, the playground equipment Avallone depicts feels like an important symbol. Are we being asked to play again? Is this what pleasure represents to the artist? I feel a subtle melancholy here, like listening to a song from one’s teenage years. For some, seeing playground equipment brings up pleasurable memories, but for how many of us are these memories tinged with other, far more complex feelings?

Observing this series as a whole, I wonder about the artist’s incredible sense of balance. Looking beyond the emotional associations at play, Avallone always seems to know where to place a line or a specific shade of green to harmonize a visual problem I hadn’t even noticed. I think about her sense of control, and I’m curious what a more immediate work from Avallone would look like. The Permission/Pleasure drawings contain an exactness that speaks to her design background, but this removes me from their emotional content for a moment. 

Overall, though, the sense of harmony within Avallone’s work feels uplifting and hopeful, like something to aspire toward. Her assuredness is a form of permission. Avallone’s drawings suggest that the images rattling around in our brains contain a specific beauty, even when they are tangled or childlike. It’s a sentiment that bears repeating.

Permission/Pleasure was on view at Never Lab from May 15 — August 9, 2021.

This review was made possible in part because of the support from our Patreon members.

Lindsay Costello is an artist, writer, and herbalist-in-training in Portland, OR. She has written art criticism for Hyperallergic, Art Papers, Art Practical, Oregon Arts Watch, and many other publications.