Sally Gil: Open and Shut - Artist Statement

Sally Gil - Underground Mansion - Paper collage and paint on stretched canvas - 25" x 28" - 2021  

 

My individual 2D works, while not strictly autobiographical, are imbued with my personal history and discoveries and thoughts about living in the world. I draw upon the specifics and history of imagery, location, and what responses I have at the time. I am after what I do not know, and what is beyond and behind our apparent world. My works are at once a celebration of beauty, immenseness, and mysterious organization seen in the person-made and natural world - and a mourning for the loss that is inherent in everything. Most recently, my work responds particularly to the specific locations and architecture where it is intended to be seen, in site-specific gallery exhibitions and, more permanently, in public art. It is made through a process of decisions based on composition, intuition, and happenstance. Print media images and painted paper and elements are arranged and piled up, abutting each other, suggestive of narrative. The layers of paper and paint, worked on over time, express a concurrent story of the life the painting itself has lived. Paper materials are built in layers from fragments torn and cut and applied as collage or papier-mâché. Painting and drawing are used as editing, linking, and elaborating tools to create context and justification. I am interested in history specifically seen in sequences of how and why things came to be, and in the relationships and narrative connections between parts. Painting and mark-making happen in real time, connecting disparate elements and linking imagery to the present.

-Sally Gil