“I Dream In Black And White” Exhibition

Olympia

poster for “I Dream In Black And White” Exhibition
[Image: Anna Berlin "Today, or Tomorrow" (2021) Acrylic and on canvas, 55 x 40 in.]

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Olympia presents I Dream in Black and White, a group exhibition of works by Eve Aschheim, Anna Berlin, Lisa Corinne Davis, Brenda Goodman, Melissa Meyer, Susannah Phillips, and Elena Sisto. The works selected from these artists use monochrome to visualize an internal dreamscape.

Anyone will say they do not dream in black and white, but rarely does one dream in full color. In this group of works, the moniker ‘black and white’ can serve as a stand-in or referent for the internal shadow world of sleep. Often, the colors black and white are considered binaries, or stark opposites on a value spectrum. But these tones had less opposing origins; in Olde English, where black and bleach had the same Indo-European root, blac means ‘to burn.’ Sometimes black is bright and shining, and burns with light; sometimes white is cool and dark.

The liminal space between dark and light is a delicate and active transition. Wiley and coy, it is tricksy; it has tipping points. White serves strange and other-worldly functions in Susannah Phillip’s interiors, as light flitting in bright shapes or gaps. In Slice of Light, perhaps it locates the moon somewhere far above the picture plane. In Elena Sisto’s works, white becomes silvery, a shimmer as well as a linear descriptor on a velvety black plane; one minute the line acts as an indicator of shape, the next it dissolves into value, as in Quarantine 4. Figures float and drift in this dream-like, internal realm. Brenda Goodman’s ghostly self-portrait links an internal abstract language with the perceptual.

Tones transform, electric and dizzying in Lisa Corinne Davis’s works, warping and expanding the visual space at play within the compositions. In Melissa Meyer’s oil stick drawings, black and whites fluctuate between positive and negative shapes. Eve Aschheim can make a small work feel vast with the elegant tension between the floating lines of both stark and subdued values. In contrast, Anna Berlin’s dense, repetitive flower motif is as shallow a space as it is generous.

The result of this assemblage of paintings and drawings that spans many decades is a meditation on monochrome and its ability to express an internal world.

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Schedule

from August 14, 2021 to September 18, 2021

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