Allston Skirt Gallery is pleased to announce the launch of our Fall 2003 season with the opening of an exhibition of new paintings by Tina Feingold. In her first solo exhibition at the gallery, Feingold shows complex paintings that engage the realms of both abstraction and figuration. These lush works have ties to observed reality -- the landscape, the human figure, fruit in a bowl -- yet at the same time are informed by Feingold’s pressing interest in the sheer physical act of painting with oil on canvas. Feingold’s working method of setting down layer after layer of paint over an extended period of time results in amazingly luminous colors from an otherworldly palette, built-up edges that reveal the painting’s history like a geological sample, and images that provoke emotion and slow down time for the viewer. Feingold’s new work extends her exploration of issues including capturing a sense of simultaneous gravity and weightlessness in her paintings, which often combine an urge for buoyancy with the weight of being deeply embedded, like a glimpse of someone floating under water, or shrouded in a dream. The process of painting and repainting her canvases contributes to an internal dialogue in the work between two and three dimensionality, as well as between abstraction and representation.
In the Mini Skirt this month, we present new work on paper by Meryl Blinder, who prints and then handpaints repeated images of cranes and other highly decorative birds onto lushly colored watercolor paper, using handmade rubber stamps. In this body of work, Blinder creates images that are both poetic, with a deeply personal feeling, and at the same time mechanical, evoking nostalgic wallpaper patterns or a mutant Audubon print that has somehow multiplied. The pull between illusionistic space - birds soaring in endless sky or wading out in boundless sea - and the flat plane of the paper puts a dynamic edge on Blinder’s thoroughly charming installation.