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Email PageSight Lines
October 12, 2006- November 11, 2006
Reception: October 12, 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Sara Eichner
Sears-Peyton Gallery
210 11th AveSears-Peyton Gallery is pleased to present our first solo exhibition of works by Sara Eichner. Sight Lines is Eichner’s second one person show in New York.
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I FIRST ENCOUNTERED SARA EICHNER’S WORK in Syracuse, ny where she was exhibiting a landscape series about Erie Boulevard—the main drag in the city of Syracuse and a relic of the old Erie Canal. Eichner fixed her gaze upwards, above the traffic and franchises of commercial congestion, playfully and almost naively towards the sky. In this early work, one could see the development of Eichner’s interest in looking from a different angle and directing the viewer’s sight in a direction that distances us from rote urban repetition. This early series also offers a frame of reference for discussing Eichner’s current visual interrogation of the act of looking, the object of observation, and the orientation of the viewer’s look. Having relocated from Syracuse to Brooklyn, the walls of brick-work, siding, fencing and shingles that form the texture of Eichner’s Williamsburg neighborhood are the inspiration for her “exteriors.” Eichner’s decontextualized details are rendered expansive in vibrating complementary colors and arranged to create optical unease that compels the viewer to look more closely. Upon further inspection, the viewer notices the deliberately thick paint application, the delicate brushwork, and the snowflake uniqueness of every repeated shape. Stepping back again, the viewer discovers the shuddering tension of having to resolve being both too close and too far, obliquely situated and, indeed, located in an odd position that is both intimate and defamiliarizing. Meanwhile, Eichner’s “interiors” counter the apparently more uniform geometric motif of the “exteriors” and summon the controlled and delimited tradition of the still life. The patterns are derived from Victorian wallpaper (and draw some compelling images from the period essay by Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s, The Yellow Wallpaper). When rendered in gouache on paper, the wallpaper drawings have a velvety relief to them that resembles the flocked and damask textures that are their reference. The very “objectness” of the drawings becomes their subject. When painted in Eichner’s voluptuous oils, the floral repeats tend to diminish almost imperceptibly towards an unseen vanishing point. Again, we wrestle with competing horizontal, vertical, and diagonal movement and the resulting optical trickery that warps the right angles of Eichner’s true rectangular panels. While all of Eichner’s works initially capture the viewer’s gaze via the formal regularity of their repeating, intricate, and illusionistic grids, upon closer observation, each one of Eichner’s finely wrought paintings are full of emotion and a record of their own inspired production. Overall, the distinctive feature of Eichner’s sublime pattern-making is her ability to direct our sight away, for the moment, from what is directly in front of us—a direction of looking that enables us to see our world differently for the moment and, perhaps, reimagine the world we inhabit.
—Melissa Friedling
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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Sears-Peyton Gallery was last updated: 2008-10-07
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