Artist's
Statement
These paintings developed from an interest in examining the
accidental and sensory experience of memory: the heady resurfacing
of a quality of light or the timbre of a voice, the coincidence of
combining a moment from the past with a particular moment in the
present, and the shifting nature of interpretation and
reinterpretation. Often the present reconfigures the past by
combining fragments in ways that take on new meanings. In my
paintings on wood panels, I am interested in inventing situations
that seem both old and new, that confuse the distant past with the
immediate present. In each, the concreteness of these
situations disproves their improbability and suggests a place that
exists where bits and pieces, unmoored from their proper location,
create meaning.
Curator's
Statement
Today's painter faces substantial hurdles transcending the
burden of painting's weighty history, particularly given that its
materials and techniques have remained, for the most part,
unchanged over several centuries. Can one build something
relevant and new by heaping more onto the vast pile of history?
Although history may not change, how we
perceive it does. Zlotsky's paintings reflect our shifting
memory of time and confronts head on the history of painting.
Many of her images of familiar objects are appropriated from 18th
century Italian, Dutch and Spanish Old Masters' still life
paintings. These images, juxtaposed with modern, common
objects, shed their meaning once distanced from their original
contexts. Whether art historical appropriations or childhood
relics, the symbols adapt their meaning to the changed environment
and create a wholly new relationship. As a result, separate
histories are compressed into one time and space.
Human memory tends to veil history through
nostalgia but associated emotions buried within the psyche can be
triggered by everyday things and coincidental events. What
Freud refers to as the uncanny, familiar objects are those that
often elicit the greatest fear. They tend to trigger memories
of the most terrifying nature, those things "that ought to have
remained hidden and secret, and yet come to light."
Zlotsky's images tend to imply such revelations and give rise to her
work's unnerving edge.
I am pleased to bring Deborah Zlotsky's
paintings to IUP. As a fellow painter, I am seduced by her
impeccable attention to detail and spontaneous, painterly layering
of varnishes. I also find courage in her strategy of embracing
painting's burdensome history while finding relevance to the
contemporary context, and thus rekindling the long forsaken genre of
still life. Most importantly, as a viewer, I am profoundly
moved by the psychological events she depicts with such simple,
everyday things.
No
doubt, one could sink into profound daydreaming to be moved by the
vast museum of insignificant things. To restore the soul to
corners, it is better to have an old slipper or a doll's head . . .
Then, from the depths of his corner, the dreamer remembers all the
objects identified with solitude and which are betrayed by the mere
fact of having been forgotten, abandoned in a corner.
(Bachelard,
Poetics of Space, 142-3)
Deborah
Zlotsky show at Kipp in January
A solo exhibition of painter Deborah Zlotsky's work will open the
spring semester exhibition schedule in Kipp Gallery.
Prof. Susan Palmisano, who has exhibited
with Zlotsky, will curate this show.
Zlotsky, who lives and teaches in Albany,
N.Y., will be at the Jan. 25 opening.
"This is a really busy year,"
said Zlotsky, who has recently exhibited at the ARC Gallery in
Chicago and has an upcoming show at Albany Center Galleries.
After the Kipp Gallery show closes Feb. 17, her work travels to
the Crealde School of Art, Winter Park, Fla.
Zlotsky's paintings use imagery
appropriated from art historical references "sensually
painted" and combining elements of realism and surrealism.
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