"Landscapes, Heads, Drapery, and Devils" Exhibition
Lisa Cooley Fine Art
This event has ended.
The exhibition title derives from a list of things that are commonly “seen” when we are confronted with perceptual ambiguity. In the moments before our mind can reconcile an unfamiliar shape or mass, it overlays fragments of a known quantity in an effort to recognize and order our experience. This process of projection and the fragments of our selves that we embed into our understanding of the world—the making of recognition—has been the basis of Shirreff’s photography, video, and sculpture for the past several years. The nonspecific descriptors in the show’s title sets the stage for a body of work that is temporally placeless; in Landscapes, Heads, Drapery, and Devils Shirreff conjures forms that evoke ancient geologic history and otherworldly, ephemeral phenomena.
A series of silver gelatin photographs depict small sculptures the artist has molded from wax-based clay. Hovering in a field of black, the shapes emerge from shadow and present themselves as a plainspoken taxonomy, albeit of an indeterminate subject. Lustrous, incised surfaces and billowy, flared volumes recall artifacts from prehistory, diagrams, simple organisms, or astral events, sometimes all at once.
In Two Moons, a pair of adjacent video monitors screen an image of a moon-like orb partially shrouded in darkness. In one, the form takes shape gradually as the ambient light brightens and dims; the other rotates in the frame, revealing its shape as it slowly rolls into view. Two Moons continues Shirreff’s interest in our experience of form when it is flattened into image and at a remove—the way we perceive the moon in our own night sky—and the effect duration has on what and how we see.
Media
Schedule
from October 25, 2009 to December 20, 2009
Opening Reception on 2009-10-25 from 18:00 to 20:00