Deanna Sirlin "Emergency Orange"
M55 Art
This event has ended.
New York M55 ART presents a solo exhibition of drawings, collages, and an installation by Deanna Sirlin. These works all date from 2012 and result from the artist’s exploration of a bold new palette of fluorescent, neon, and electric colors. They reflect the direct impact of our current visual environment: the colors of highway emergency gear, the colors that make athletes stand out on the playing field, the colors of the packaging for myriad consumer products. These colors were fashionable in the 1960s, then went out of favor, but now are tightly woven into the fabric of our visual landscape. Sirlin’s mixed media collages incorporate elements directly from this landscape, including pieces of advertisements, product packaging, and other bits of commercial design, which Sirlin combines with transparency film and transforms through drawing and painting. Although they possess the immediacy of current visual culture, they also evoke art historical references from Bauhaus fabric design and color experiments to the gesturality of Abstract Expressionism and the high-keyed colors and cultural referentiality of Pop Art. Sirlin likens her work to fusion cuisine, saying: “I mix colors from our urban landscape and popular culture with the intimate gestures of Abstract Expressionism to make my work.”
A highlight of the exhibition will be a new, site-specific installation for the gallery’s windows derived from the imagery of the collages.
About Deanna Sirlin
Deanna Sirlin was born in Brooklyn, New York and currently has a studio outside of Atlanta. As a painter who works in multiple mediums and creates site works, commissions, and projects she passionately blends multiple disciplines in her work. “I am walking a tightrope between traditional image making and digital technology. By bridging this gap in my work I have created a new language that is reflective of my viewpoint of the visual world around me.” Sirlin’s notable works include Retracings, commissioned by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and Vanishing Point for Ca’ Fosscari, the University of Venice, Italy.
I am a painter. Although shape, form and content are crucially important, it is color that has always moved me, intrigued me, and prompted my ongoing investigations of the painted world. The new colors I am using are related to my older palettes, but they present the challenge of the glare of colors for which I have no art historical references, only the contemporary world of sport, fashion, design and safety clothes. I always want to steal the emergency orange cones that line the highways, especially when I see that they had been splashed with marks that range from a gestural brushstroke of tar to geometric tapes of hot pink and lime. Maybe I already have.
Deanna Sirlin
Milton, Georgia
August 2012
www.deannasirlin.com
Media
Schedule
from September 05, 2012 to September 22, 2012
Opening Reception on 2012-09-08 from 18:00 to 20:00