NYAB Event - Sheila Gallagher “Ravishing Far/Near”

Sheila Gallagher “Ravishing Far/Near”

DODGEgallery

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DODGEgallery presents Ravishing Far/Near, an exhibition of new mixed media work by Sheila Gallagher. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, and will be accompanied by a publication including an essay by Dr. Richard Kearney, Professor of Philosophy at Boston College.

Gallagher is known for thematic examinations and rigorous material explorations. Often inventing specific processes in order to articulate a conceit, she sews a conceptual thread through diverse mediums, creating a sensuous canopy of unexpected relationships. Rich with cross-fertilizations, the resulting works display both a rare pictorial intelligence and a deep investment in contemporary art practice as a form of theological inquiry. In Ravishing Far/Near, Gallagher challenges the stand-off between contemporary art and religion by mining imagery, symbols and examples of mystico-eroticism from Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and Christianity. The resulting “iconomash” is a representation of the desire for spiritual experience to intersect with contemporary secular culture. Gallagher “seeks to create an exhibition that blends thinking and form across images and objects, and uses religious tropes and aesthetic pleasures as opportunities for interpretation.”

Ravishing Far/Near expands Gallagher’s exploration of the fertile interplay between the sacred and the profane. The exhibition title was coined by Marguerite Porete, a Christian female mystic who was burned at the stake in 1310 for penning a daring theological treatise on the ecstasy of the soul in love. Inspired by visual and literary examples of sacred eros, including The Gita Govinda, Sufi poetry, and the Song of Songs, Ravishing Far/Near explores the kinship between the spiritual, sexual, and creative through smoke paintings, large plastic reliefs, video, flower installations, and sculpture.

Plastic Glenstal and Plastic Lila, Gallagher’s plastic painted landscapes, are composed of thousands of melted shards of trash—credit cards, detergent containers, bottle caps, toys, party dreck. In these works, Gallagher develops her investigation of the garden as the site of the theo-erotic encounter in various wisdom traditions. Plastic Glenstal represents a walled garden that Gallagher visited at a Benedictine Abbey in Limerick, Ireland where for several decades monks have been collecting and cultivating the plant life mentioned in the Bible. To the existing barley, cedars, figs, and artichokes, Gallagher has added rose of sharon and lilies, references to the lovers in the Song of Songs where the female self-identifies as an “enclosed garden”, a place where sexual love is sanctified and protected.

Similarly while there are no figures in Rasa, Gallagher’s video of a three-dimensional miniature model of an 18th century Kangra painting also addresses the blending of human and divine love. Gallagher’s constructed set, including hand-painted walls and bonsai plants grown and pruned over several months, is slowly engulfed in flames accompanied by a soundtrack sampled from sound clips of love scenes from Western films. Rasa, a Sanskrit word that can be translated as “essence”, “juice” or “spiritual rapture”, also refers to an emotional response of a viewer evoked by a work of art, a kind of “aesthetic love of love.” In Rasa, Gallagher re-imagines an amorous encounter between RadhaKrishna, the love union which exemplifies the highest form of the soul’s ascent in certain branches of Hinduism. Rasa both instantiates the scene and Gallagher’s response to the painting, while nodding to the limits of her western subjectivity.

By bringing to light the innate connections between spirituality and sexual desire through the creative process, Gallagher tackles head-on the long disavowed relationship between contemporary art and religion. Combining imagery and materials that are packed with overlapping metaphorical associations, Ravishing Far/Near invites inner forms of interpretation that are triggered by small experiences of synchronicity. Rethinking the relation between trash and treasure, mundane and sacramental, immanence and transcendence, Ravishing Far/Near sparks an affair between contemporary art practice and religious experience.

Sheila Gallagher was born in 1967 in Morristown, New Jersey. She received her BA from Connecticut College in 1989 and her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1996. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Cummings Art Center, Connecticut College, New London, CT; Danforth Museum of Fine Art, Framingham, MA and Tisch Gallery, Tufts University, Medford, MA. She was the recipient of the Buttenweizer Scholarship, Young American Scholar, and Thomas J. Watson Foundation Fellowship. She was a finalist for the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston Foster Prize, St. Botolph Foundation Distinguished Artist Award, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Maud Morgan Prize. She is the recipient of the Traveling Scholars Fellowship and finalist for the solo presentation at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, 2015. Gallagher’s work has been reviewed in Art in America, Hyperallergic, Bloomberg,and The Boston Globe, among others. Her work is included in the collection of deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Fidelity Investments, the Philadelphia Eagles, and Wellington Management. She has lectured and taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Wellesley College, Harvard University, Saint Gaudens, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, and is an associate professor of fine arts at Boston College. Gallagher lives and works in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.

[Image: Sheila Gallagher “Plastic Lila”(2013), melted plastic mounted on armature, approximately 84 x 64 inches. Photo: Stewart Clements]