Skye Gilkerson & Sarah Steinwachs

Out of Context, September 2011

Grizzly Grizzly is pleased to announce the two-person exhibition ‘Out of Context,’ featuring artists Skye Gilkerson from Baltimore and Sarah Steinwachs, a Philadelphia native.  Both artists create intricately collaged works on paper, wielding their X-acto knives with the precision of a surgeon’s blade.  Yet their results are radically different – and entirely intriguing – investigations of mark-making and illusory space.

From a distance, Skye Gilkerson’s works on paper look like quiet abstractions.  Upon closer inspection, the drawings reveal themselves to be collages built with punctuation marks cut from magazines.  The density of the marks, reassembled in loosely formed grids, suggest the passage of time; lifted from their original context, the marks become author-less. The sentences attached to each of these punctuation marks are implied but never revealed, and the basic elements of written communication are transformed into an exploration of structure, referencing architecture and landscape.

Sarah Steinwachs’ series Paper Microcosms began with an impulse to cut out the spaces between the grid lines of graph paper, a practice that transforms the illusion of space into actual space. The lines that remain are contradictory to the air around them, a two-dimensional construct in a three-dimensional reality. By layering these “in-between” dimensions, Steinwachs creates environments suggestive of both the everyday and the fantastic.  The multi-layered works function as architectural abstraction - of iron bars over a screened window, for example - and also to the curving nets of string theory.

Skye Gilkerson lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland.  She has recently exhibited her work nationally, in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Nashville, and internationally at the Tate Modern in London, England.  Philadelphian, Sarah Steinwachs is an Assistant Professor at Drexel University.  In addition to being 2011 Fleisher Challenge winner, her work has recently been featured internationally in solo exhibitions in China, Italy, and Israel.