November 30 – December 30, 2012
‘COURSE CORRECTIONS’
GALE WALLAR
Opening Reception: Friday. November 30, 6 – 8:30 PM
Third Thursday: Thursday, December 20, 6 - 8:30 PM
901 New York Avenue NW, Washington DC 20001
As it has been made clear to us, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” And as David Byrne and The Talking Heads sang, “How did I get here?”
A navigator uses ‘course corrections’ to compensate for drift or deviation from a course that has been set. In the big picture, history, literature, economics, art – there is no linear course and all of these overlap. Closer to home, in our lives, we can be thrown off our charted course. Things happen. At one time or another, all of us are navigators. And we make course corrections.
Gale Wallar’s paintings and drawings in the exhibit ‘Course Corrections’ explore things we might not know and reflect
on how we got here/there. An abandoned Dutch colonial office building in
Jakarta? A façade on 7th Street NW in DC with an immigrant
story? An urban skyline in the
City of Light (or, perhaps, it is a city with a dark side)? What is the
deviation and what is the ‘correction’? The images are chosen for their visual
impact and invite close observation.
There is no overt or anecdotal message. They hint at something the viewer might want to know.
The work is representational but, because of eliminations, simplifications, color adjustments and other visual choices, cannot be classified as pure realism.
If viewed in abstract terms one finds a pattern of structure and hidden geometry. The picture plane is broken up with value and color changes, which enhances the effect of push and pull. Positive shapes break into negative space in a dynamic manner. The resulting image has expanding and contracting forces that contain both vitality and stability. Not rendering, but a visual conveyance into another plane that might not have been predicted. A corrected course.
Wallar was born into a military family and a nomadic childhood enhanced her exposure to art, architecture and history. Like many other DC residents, she has spent decades as an adult moving around the globe and navigating drift and compass coordinates. Her high school years were spent in the DC area and she holds a BFA degree from Ohio Wesleyan University and an MA in Art History from George Washington University. Her studio has been set up in Geneva and Bern (Switzerland), Bonn and Frankfurt (Germany), Paris, Moscow, and Jakarta, Indonesia. Her work is in collections in Europe and the United States.
Images: “Jakarta” and ‘DC Rooftops” by Gale Wallar
For more information please contact Ksenia Grishkova, Director, at 202-347-2787 or e mail info@touchstonegallery.com