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falling through the mirror Emily Jan/Tammy Salzl main gallery |
Events Vernissage: Thursday February 28, 5-7 PM |
Left: Tammy Salzl, The Chorus, 2011, oil on canvas 152 x 213 cm
Right: Emily Jan, Selkie, 2012, wool, reed, resin, feathers, human and synthetic hair, tulle, hydrocal, found branches, metal shelf, silk dyed with juniper, birch, pomegranate, sumac, and iron, 152 x 46 x 46 cm
About
Tammy Salzl and Emily Jan will stage a joint exhibition of large-scale oil paintings and sculptural installations to present an expanded narrative informed by chronicles of the monstrous.
The artists are interested particularly in the ambivalence around the narratives of the monster. The monstrous is often where that which is irreconcilable with society’s status quo is forced to dwell: the anomalies, the Other, the unknown: that which is misunderstood and that which is feared. Their sympathies as artists converge here, in a kind of empathy for and identification with that which has been pushed to the fringe. For Salzl and Jan, this liminal area is paradoxically where one encounters the deepest humanity.
falling through the mirror encapsulates this sense of otherworldliness constructed by the artists. Salzl’s large-scale canvasses of somewhat macabre vignettes wrought in minute detail ring the walls while Jan’s hand-built hybrid animal forms leave us no where to escape them. The work in invites immersion, invites falling through the mirror to enter a world that is ambiguous about whether it is our own or a parallel reality, or perhaps both.
Emily Jan
The magical crosses over into the monstrous with a whisper, and back again. Dreams of suspension, of time slowed down, of falling, and of floating between the worlds, ride the line between wonder and terror for the sleeping dreamer. These are all experiences we have shared, but which our waking minds forget...
I am most interested in the point where stories and reality cross over into each other and blur: the meeting between the probable and the improbable, where real animals enter the realm of the mythic, and legends bleed into the quotidian world. This is where the sublime occurs for me – where the known touches the unknown.
Tammy Salzl
The stories we tell ourselves about who we are, who we were, and what we are becoming are implicit in my work. I am captivated and disturbed by the way we identify ourselves in relation to other species, each other and our environment.
I view my new body of work as vignettes, true parables from a fairy tale book about a society distorted and chaotic. Through the alchemy of paint I filter popular culture, mythology, history and my own internal landscape in order to construct familiar yet unsettling narratives.
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