Norah Lovell: A Last Resort
March 14 - June 7, 2020
On-line tour video by Norah Lovell. Scroll down for still images with artist’s comments!
Make an appointment to view current exhibition in person during our galley hours HERE.
This is view of the installation as you enter the gallery. The image in the window “Shade/Sombra” is a photocollage printed on translucent fabric. Initially, it was intended as a dialogue with the window, literally a shade, figuratively a ghost. Installed, it also becomes a film still-projecting out, projecting in.
Moving left to right inside the exhibit, there are minglings of photocollage prints depicting individual motel rooms in a phantom, borderland resort and orb-paintings, titled “Hemispheres/Esferas.” All of the titles are in English/Spanish to reflect partitioning of humans, and cordoning of species.
The color scheme of the paintings is a suppressed grisaille (mostly a mixture of violet/yellow) intended to ghost, or shadow the high chroma prints. Shared imagery drifts back and forth between print images and paintings, also in transit.
Spheres/Esferas are wall mounted with pyramidal paintings
Sphere/Esferas, room, Rooms 3 and 8 (prints) and pyramid painting. Spoon billed roseate, vulture, wolf spider, red fox and black capped vireo.
Continuing along the wall to the corner, the installation arrives at a forced perspective (spatially, psychologically) evoking the sense of two mirrors meeting.
The bisected, orb-like paintings have a combined vertical dimension of 15 inches each. Scenes from the prints-armadillos, screech owls, wild boar, big horn sheep and other creatures that traverse the US Mexico border are depicted. Color is utilized as in a map key-to point out features in the scape, and sometimes indicate danger.
In each painting (titled hemispheres/emesferos) the gap between spheres progressively becomes wider, like a tectonic shift or magnates under pressure-pushing back and jolting sideways.
Blue jay, cardinal, indigo snake, red fox.
Camo, map, pyramid. Each occupies a tiny space-under 12 inches, like a page or book.
Pyramid detail-east/southeast face-brown pelican, black tailed jackrabbit, black widow
Pyramid-northwest face-red shouldered hawk, golfers.
This is an installation view of the wall to the left side of the gallery entrance.
Rooms 3 and 9 with a sphere painting—Glass/Vaso
Glass/Vaso is 7” inches diameter and Room 5 is 10” diameter-flasche paint on panel.
Here you can see the painting of room 5 next to the print of room 5. The prints were the first images to come in this series with subsequent paintings that aim to lose something in translation, also functioning like crime scene photography (closer looking does not always yield the truth). Yellow warbler and jaguarundi.
Rooms 13 and 17, sphere painting and pyramid-ocelots, warblers, grey wolf, tarantula
A detail from pyramid painting, including Liz Norton, Mexico circa 1991 in right corner
Tarantulas!
Final image from A Last Resort...Poof.