Deanna Sirlin: Wavelength
Chastain Gallery Presents
Deanna Sirlin: Wavelength
Deanna Sirlin/Wavelength, presented at Chastain Gallery by the Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs, City of Atlanta, is an exhibition of recent paintings by artist Deanna Sirlin, whose multidisciplinary practice includes installations, paintings, collaborative film works, and sculpture. Color is Sirlin’s primary inspiration. Wavelength is composed of paintings made beginning in 2020 that explore her relationship to color, paint, and the physicality of the gesture in the process of painting.
Wavelength also includes Sirlin’s investigation of the digital through a new video work made in collaboration with Portuguese filmmaker Nuno Veiga. This collaboration recontextualizes Sirlin’s transparent installations recently on view in Evora, Portugal, and currently in Venice, Italy, and at Georgia Tech’s Crosland Library in Atlanta. The film transforms Sirlin’s paintings through movement, light, and sound.
Deanna Sirlin was born in Brooklyn, New York. Sirlin lives and works on a farm outside of Atlanta, Georgia. Her work has been exhibited at the High Museum of Art (Atlanta); Daugavpils Mark Rothko Art Centre (Latvia); Shenzhen Institute of Fine Arts, Shenzhen, PR China; Universita Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Venice; and Kunsthaus Nürnberg, Nürnberg, Germany. She has received many awards and recently was the Artist-in-Residence at Crosland Library of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia. Her installation, Borders of Light and Water, 2022 is in the exhibition, Reflections, curated by the European Cultural Center at Palazzo Bembo in Venice, Italy, a collateral exhibition of the 59th Venice Biennale. `
Sirlin says of her work, “I have realized that my paintings are about the physicality of my entire body making the mark. A favorite place for me is to be immersed in water. It is like being “in” the color. The process of painting is a physical conversation with my eye and body as they move within the color. My paintings are abstract, but my vocabulary comes from my study of nature and its geometry. My color is influenced by light and by watching and paying attention to light as it moves and changes. The flux and flicker of color engage me.”
Kevin Sipp, Curator of the Chastain Gallery, Gallery 72, and the Mayor’s Gallery has written about Wavelength, “Deanna Sirlin has established herself as one of the premier colorists of her generation. Her experiments across various forms of media from paint to projection showcase her relentless interrogation of the language of color and light, giving the viewing public a doorway to an immersive interaction with the physicality of her process.”
Wavelength opens at Chastain Gallery on Monday, September 12, 2022, and will run through October 28, 2022. The gallery is open from 9:30 AM until 5 PM on Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays and until 9 PM on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
Opening Reception: Sunday, September 18 from 2 – 4 PM
Artist Talk: Saturday, September 24 from 2 – 4 PM
Opal Moore Poetry Reading: Saturday, October 1 from 2 – 4 PM
