Back to list In Ellen Gallagher's exhibition we witness a
collapse of time. Fictional and non-fictional characters
are merged and reanimated in this new body of works
which disrupt our sense of the here and now. The pulpy ephemera Gallagher selects as support
for her paintings and drawings - lined penmanship paper,
magazine pages, journals, advertisements - are all
subjected to her process of transformation. Only traces
of their past life remain, like forensic evidence, the
precise measure and significance of which remains
unclear. This state of "un-knowing" fascinates
Gallagher and is one of the primary themes in her work.
The inky saturation, smudges, staining, perforations,
punctures, spills, abrasions, printed lettering and
marking constitute an evocative testament to the grip of time. Encountering Gallagher's work at close range is
akin to charting unfamiliar territory or ruins. As we
navigate between legibility and blankness, corporal
features surface out of a sea of abstracted forms.
Protagonists recur in various guises, and in 'An
Experiment Of Unusual Opportunity', 2008, a medical
report of the Tuskegee Experiment figures as a macabre
landscape. A dark brooding configuration unfolds from an
ink-stained ground. Fragmentation, cutting, collage and
juxtapositions facilitate the meeting of incompatible
narratives: fact and fiction merge in a vortex. The
silhouetted figures against a bold, geometric gold
ground in 'IGBT', 2008, serve to deny any pictorial
illusion, as do the flat fields of colour and grid-like
compositional structure of untitled, 1996, an early
painting included in the show. Gallagher's process is one of accumulation and
obliteration: her marks intrude and break out over or
under surfaces. In this exhibition her process bleeds
out from the picture plane to claim the upper walls of
the gallery space through a frieze of penmanship paper,
heightening our sense of immersion in the mutable realm
Gallagher has created. The gallery will be open on Easter Saturday but
closed on Good Friday and Easter Sunday. | 
