Isca Greenfield-Sanders “Keep Them Still”

Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe

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AMERINGER | McENERY | YOHE presents Keep Them Still, an exhibition of oil paintings and watercolors. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Adam Gopnik.

In her paintings, Isca Greenfield-Sanders mines the possibilities of found images, extracting and distilling the fragments of information they provide. The works in this exhibition examine scenes with increasing levels of detail, from wide-angle beach views to extreme close-ups of rippling waves. Photography serves not only as their basis but also as their subject, as Greenfield-Sanders explores the ways in which images act as stand-ins for experiences.

For the past twenty years, the artist has culled her imagery from vintage color slides, which she scans and digitally manipulates. The resulting composite is printed on rice paper and transformed with watercolor, colored pencil, and oil. She enlarges this mixed media watercolor, dividing it into a grid that she prints in individual squares and affixes to a canvas. She then completes the work with oil paint. This complex transfer of media allows Greenfield-Sanders to break down the initial photographic image and rebuild it in infinite permutations.
The multilayered works depict scenes that feel faintly recognizable, like childhood remembrances softened by the haze of time—this despite the fact that the original photographs have been entirely transformed. In this way, Greenfield- Sanders’ paintings operate much like memory, where moments lose their integrity the more they are recalled. As Adam Gopnik notes, her works are rooted in “a time that we cannot quite locate and a beach we cannot quite visit—something stilled that challenges our imaginations and moves us by its immobility.”

ISCA GREENFIELD-SANDERS was born in New York City, where she currently lives and works. She earned her Bachelors degree in art and math from Brown University. Greenfield-Sanders has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY; Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, Germany; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, CO.
Her work may be found in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA; Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, Germany; Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston, TX; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England.