Ellen Gallagher

Black Comb from DeLuxe, 2004-2005, a portfolio of 60 etchings w/ photogravure, spitbite, collage, cutting, scratching, silkscreen, plasticine, offset lithography, and hand building. Courtesy of Two Palms Press, NY

Ellen Gallagher

Wiglette from DeLuxe, 2004-2005, a portfolio of 60 etchings w/ photogravure, spitbite, collage, cutting, scratching, silkscreen, plasticine, offset lithography, and hand building. Courtesy of Two Palms Press, NY

Ellen Gallagher: Murmur and DeLuxe

February 12 – April 3, 2005

The exhibition features Gallagher’s new multiple portfolio, DeLuxe, along with drawings, and 16mm film projections. It is curated by MOCA Director Bonnie Clearwater.

Ellen Gallagher’s work explores issues of race, identity and transformation. In DeLuxe, 2004/05, a new portfolio of her multiples published by the innovative Two Palms Press in New York, she manipulates advertisements and stories from the magazines Our World, Sepia, and Ebony.

Gallagher stated, “I take archival material from original black photo magazines and reactivate it through a series of transformations using plasticine, coconut oil, etching, paint, ink, toy eyeballs, and crystals. These fugitive characters reoccur throughout the grid both as themselves and other worldy presences. Each repetition is an inauguration of the character into an altered state.”

DeLuxe, 2004/2005 is comprised of a suite of 60 framed multiples that join together to form a large-scale work that is deceptively abstract. Upon closer inspection, the grid-like structure reveals that each individual unit contains articles from the 1930s through the 1970s, some depicting women with flamboyantly sculpted bright yellow wigs that reveal the hand of the artist and contrast the work’s rigid composition.

Gallagher is not only inspired by the aesthetic of the advertisements, but her re-working of these images is also prompted by the text within them that includes names for synthetic wig materials such as “afrilon”, “afrilic” and “Nu-Nile”. The divergence of the grid-like structure and the elaborate wigs reference the tension between the geometric and the organic, order and chaos, individuality and conformity, authenticity and artifice. DeLuxe ultimately expresses the potential of freedom through transformation and the universal desire for an expansive identity.

The experimental process Gallagher explored during the time she created the images for DeLuxe influenced her work in other media including film and works on paper. Murmur, 2003, a series of five 16mm film projections, created with Edgar Cleijne, reference Gallagher’s collages and drawings with their delicately elusive oceanic imagery and distinctive use of footage from vintage sci-fi films such as the Ray Bradbury classic, It Came From Outer Space. Through stop-action animation techniques and the alteration of found images through scratching and collage, the artist’s projections achieve a painterly, textural effect. The films intimately display the images onto the wall as though they were animated drawings.

Also on view will be the Watery Ecstatic Series, 2003 and Wish-Whish-Whisk, 2003, works on paper in which Gallagher uses various techniques including carving and layering papers to create fluid underwater scenes.
Ellen Gallagher lives and works in New York and Rotterdam.

Ellen Gallagher: Murmur and DeLuxe is sponsored by Jacquelyn and Bruce Brown, Jeanne and Michael Klein, Francie Bishop Good and David Horvitz, and Carolee and Nathan Reiber. Media Sponsorship by The Miami Herald.

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