NYAB Event - Rebecca Chamberlain "...Wouldn't it be sublime..."

Rebecca Chamberlain "...Wouldn't it be sublime..."

DODGEgallery

This event has ended.

Mirrored halls, arched ceilings, ascending staircases, and sweeping railings link through the compositions of Chamberlain’s diptychs and triptychs. The artist’s insatiable muse is modernist interior architecture constructed during the depression era between world wars. She indulges the trapped idealism of this time-period in haunting, wistful compositions painted with lithography ink on vintage architectural paper.

Chamberlain’s vacant subjects appear like stage-sets, while seeming quiet and hidden from the outside word. They give the impression of being impartial to human interaction, invoking completion in their own self-possessed perfection. Her compositions focus on repeating lines, mirrors, and interior windows reinforcing reflection and insularity. However, the unsettling reality that time irrevocably persists hovers within each painting.

For this exhibition, Chamberlain focuses on spaces that are transitional- staircases, lobbies and hallways. She also interrupts the quiet containment of individual compositions by creating multi-paneled pieces that literally fracture space. She contrasts photorealistic painting with panels of abstract patterning- including some of Josef Albers glass paintings, a Werner Werkstatt vase, or an iron railing- emphasizing the decorative, and suggesting the inconsequential nature of these incredible spaces. Finally, she pairs abstracted glass reproductions of vintage objects with painted representations of architectural spaces, collapsing the past and the present, the represented and the real.

Chamberlain’s source material is predominantly reproductions of black and white photographs, which are themselves incomplete, edited, and dramatized versions of the original architectural sites. She further dilutes, sharpens, and refocuses these images through her painting. Her material- vintage tracing cloth- is a literal deference to the era; It is the fabric on which ideas were drafted and carried. She works in a high contrast manner of painting- deep and bright tones, opaque edges and elusive washes- invoking the literal and the intangible, certainty and slippage.

[Image: Rebecca Chamberlain "Albers Room," "Meyercord" and "Electricity Company Headquarters" (1926-1935) (2011) litho ink on vintage tracing cloth, 36 x 100 in.]