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a.Muse Gallery

September 25 - October 8, 2009

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614 Alabama Street San Francisco, CA 94110
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Constructions
Constructions: Painterly Alterations of Photographed Landscapes by Rebecca Kerlin (www.kerlinstudio.com) A solo show of work by local artist Rebecca Kerlin will take place at a.Muse Gallery from September 12 – October 7th, 2009. Admission is free. There will be a public reception with the artist on Friday, September 25, from 6 – 9 p.m. Rebecca Kerlin combines archaic and modern media to examine points of influence and tension between cultural evolution, tradition and the individual perspective. In the “Constructions” series, Kerlin manufactures urban and suburban scenes from digital photographic prints and oil paint. The photographs are loosely joined in tessellations of multiple viewpoints and repeated imagery; oil paint unifies the compositions within a framework, which both informs and is constrained by the photographic structure. The photographs are unmodified artifacts of the image capture and printing processes, the oil palette corresponds to the printer ink tray and the panels are fabricated of construction materials, used as found. Among other things, Kerlin is interested in the biological underpinnings of sensation and emotion, the nature of individual and cultural memory and the convolution of technology and systems of meaning. She studied sculpture under Russell Dudley and Robert Morrison of Reno, Nevada. In Kerlin's own words: "Studies of patients with visual deficits indicate that although we believe that we see the world around us in seamless three-dimensional motion, our mind actually captures still images in stop-motion and then fabricates a perception of our environment from these disjoint multiples. The eye cannot capture the entirety of a scene in motion and so the mind fills in blanks and edits out anomalies with reasonable-seeming patterns and forms copied from the set of images that were stored. The photographs and the oil paint refer to this process. The construction materials used as grounds refer to the construction process and also, as do the abilities and the preconceptions of the mind, limit both the size of the photographic layout and therefore the selection of images and the overall appearance of the reconstructed scene."