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In this new body of work, Giordanne Salley constructs shifting tableaus that attempt to visualize not time itself, but the feeling of the passage of time. Our experiences of life can often feel like we are riding along on time’s arrow. Days repeat and build like the rhythm of waves lapping at the shore. Each tide brings forth trash and treasures, bits of flora and fauna, before the lunar cycle pulls them back out to sea. So too does one’s conscious experience of life move through time, accumulating, folding in on itself, and gradually building into the future.
Ripples and corrugations form over Salley’s images, diffracting their shapes into myriad frames. Like peering at the bottom of the sea through the waves, we see the subjects dance in the minute turbulence. In pieces like Endlings, these scenes verge on abstraction. Though semi-psychedelic in their optical qualities, Salley’s paintings are rooted in the natural world. Animals and human forms bathe in the undulations, adding a moment of specificity while also acting as a tether to reality and a reminder that these patterns depict the fluctuating surface of water.
Coursing through glowing layers of energy, works like Infinity Loon pair discernible imagery with vibrating geometry. The waterfowl, leaving a wake in the paint behind it, upsets the lines and creates a cascading pattern that echoes toward the edges of the frame. Though often based around real-world subjects, in these new works, Salley does away with the horizon line in an effort to flatten the surface and invoke a feeling of the infinite. Repetitive and continuous, her lines and patterns are full of potential as they press onward and outward.
Finding her color by applying paint in numerous thin layers, Salley works around predetermined lines, building up meditative markings of the hours spent. With every new application, the image grows richer. The use of collage and underdrawing affords each canvas a nuanced texture, both physical and visual. In Time Flows, Salley combines these elements as “a sort of scaffolding to hang the painting on or around.” Intense investigation rewards the viewer with subtle glimpses into the artist’s process. Each piece becomes a palimpsest, offering ghostly reminders of the past that push through to the final image.
At the heart of all of this is a potent rumination on universal themes through the lens of Salley’s own subjectivity. Like time, so too do ideas of love, loss, and memory ebb and flow infinitely like the tides. Slipping through fingers like the ocean in our hand, the present is instantaneous and always on the way out. Salley slows down these moments, capturing them in paint and offering a moment of contemplation and reverie, reminding us that everything is always changing and evolving. Reflecting the world around it, offering vital nourishment to life, and functioning as a symbol of the incomprehensible vastness of time and consciousness, water is transformative.
