NSCAD faculty member Sara Hartland-Rowe currently has an exhibition on display at Hermes Galley in Halifax (5682 North Street). ‘sweet, sweet painting’ runs until November 29, 2020. Gallery hours: Tuesday 11 a.m. – 4 p.m., Thursday 5-9 p.m., Saturday and Sunday 12-6 p.m.
Artist statement:
Over the last few years I have become increasingly absorbed with colour, specifically with looking at the spaces in between objects where form is indefinitive but colour becomes, as Michael Taussig describes it, ‘a polymorphous magical substance.’ Because of the effects of reflected light, simultaneous contrast, colour induction and so forth, any observation of colour is an observation about the dissolution of one thing into another. I have been making paintings whose work is to place the viewer in the transitory gap between the flash of perception that occurs as one grasps the totality of the visual field, and the moment just afterwards when the field is mapped and objects separate from one another. This experience comes for me when I look at deeply shadowed objects in bright (outdoor) light. Within that brief moment is an experience of a gestalt, the powerful sense that there is an underlying connection between things.
The paintings in this exhibition are experiments in testing the extent to which discrete colour relationships can ‘reach’ for one another across empty space, just as the figures in the paintings gesture toward one another.
To see more of Sara’s work, visit her website and Instagram page.