Event

StillingPost an Event »

Eleanor Harwood Gallery

September 11 - October 17, 2010

Info

1295 Alabama Street San Francisco, CA 94110
Google Map »
Stilling Colleen Sanders, poultice, 44 x 30, gouache on paper
Opening September 11th, 7-10pm We are delighted to open Colleen Sanders' first solo show. Her work is acrylic based gouache on paper. Sanders images are loaded with meaning. The paintings in this body of work get built around an armature of religious statuary. The effigy then is embellished with strands of hair, strings, geodes, trinkets and various objects. Her interest in this lies both in tapping into long-tested compositional cannons and also functions as a way for Sanders to embed a bit of the spiritual/magical/contemplative energy of the forms into to the work without the religious narratives. Sometimes the initial image is identifiable, sometimes it works more as secret DNA. For example the image in this email began as a reference to a woman carrying a bushel on her back. In Sanders' interpretation the bushel contains plants and herbs that contain healing properties, (if you look closely you will see the echinacea plants) thus the title: poultice. Sanders' paintings are slow paintings - in the making and in the viewing. Detail oriented and labor intensive, she engineers them with intentional openness of meaning that allows them to stay compelling to her over the many months of their making. An image of hair not only suggests beauty, sex, death, the abject, etc. but it also can shift and be read as musculature, water, or vegetation. At the same time it is a collection of lines. Sanders likes to play with the ways that symbols can carry meaning, but can also be used as "material" to a more formal end. A cairn of agates has a symbolic, potentially narrative read, but also works abstractly the way a wall of Kenneth Noland paintings might. Sanders will be exhibiting 6 pieces in her exhibit Stilling. Two of the pieces in the show are monumental both being about eight feet tall. The other pieces range in size from 44 x 30 up to 7 feet tall. You can see the full image of chord|cord|cored here Visit this page to see images of the work in the show