NYAB Event - Isca Greenfield-Sanders "The Ocean Between"

Isca Greenfield-Sanders "The Ocean Between"

Haunch of Venison

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Isca Greenfield-Sanders has been showing her ethereal paintings and works on paper for the past decade. Basing her paintings on found vintage slides, she uses imagery from anonymous sources to explore the relationship between painting and photography, pushing her work into an ambiguous realm between the two. Her paintings draw on art historical antecedents including Winslow Homer, Matisse, David Hockney, Gerhard Richter and Monet. Her subject matter is deliberately low-key and subtle, allowing Greenfield-Sanders to focus on her more primary concerns of the thematic and formal possibilities of landscape paintings and the relationship between memory and landscape—how universally recognizable places (beaches, suburban poolside scenes, mundane soccer matches and even film flaws) can evoke both deeply personal and communal memories and associations.

Greenfield-Sanders explores the formal possibilities of texture, surface and color through a process in which she transforms original found photographic subjects into oil paintings. Evidence of her technique is present in the carefully constructed grid that she purposely leaves intact—a vestige of her process—which is based on a Renaissance method. A vintage slide is printed onto rice paper and transformed with watercolor, colored pencil and ink. That study is then digitally enlarged and tiled onto the canvas in the grid before she finally completes the work in oil paint. Greenfield-Sanders explains, "Because my work is photographically based, the viewer has immediate access to my paintings. I find the layering of mediums and the physical layering of paints, glue, paper and prints pull apart the notion of what is understood."

Highlights from the exhibition include paintings from the artist's recent museum exhibition "Light Leaks," a series of paintings that depict the flaws specific to film photography that include lens flares, light leaks and double exposures seen through deteriorated but universal images of children's soccer games. In this series Greenfield-Sanders cites the language of photography and explores the beauty of mechanical flaws.

Older work in this exhibition includes selections from the artist's series "Against the Fall," depicting singular figures descending with parachutes through open sky. The series is based on vintage slides of military parachuting exercises during the eras of WWII and the Korean War. "A Walk with Daddy" from 2004 depicts a small girl crossing the beach by her father's side, looking towards an expansive pink sky capturing an intimate moment from the lives of strangers. It stands in ready contrast to her later "Pinelawn Pools" series that imagines bathing as a more enclosed recreation. The scene of bathers gathered around in 2006's "Swimming Pool Panorama" seems confined when compared to her earlier images of people frolicking in the surf. Greenfield-Sanders approaches her subjects from a bird's eye view; gone is the ubiquitous expansive sky or sea; replaced instead with suburban hollowness.

[Image: Isca Greenfield-Sanders "A Walk With Daddy (Pink)" (2004) Mixed media and oil on canvas 35 x 35 in.]