The Process of Seeing Group Exhibition

Galleri Urbane is pleased to present The Process of Seeing, a group exhibition featuring five women artists. Seeing implies looking, but also perceiving, reevaluating. The phenomenon is ubiquitous: a first glance offers only a glimpse; a second brings depth. Though they differ in their approaches and aesthetics, the artists in the exhibition provoke, invite, and reward the changes in perception that occur when one lingers to reconsider. They question sight and make room for our looking and for the shifts that can occur thereby. In this way, they equally ask us to reflect on how we see and present ourselves in our nested relationships to others, to nature, or to form and color itself. 

A hush surrounds the abstract, anthropomorphized paintings by Emily Bartolone, which simplify in order to delineate precise relationships of shape, color, and scale. Playful and coy, they feature amorphous forms that interact in the picture plane. Color awakens optical experiences and humor sings throughout. “I make paintings that are still formal but have these underlying examples of relationships. These simple shapes, rounded off, nestled next to each other, can feel human,” Bartolone says, and they draw the viewer into their play.  

Meghan Borah’s works on paper challenge the viewer to a game of nuanced seeing, as the female-presenting figures in her dreamy compositions melt into the background and vice versa. Tapestries and the works of Nabi painters such as Bonnard and Vuillard linger as companions in Borah’s mind. “I like to play around with this in-between space, where something can be read as flattened or in a scene,” she says, and the viewer must decide if the world of the painting is illusionistic or flat, if flowers and animals frolic with their humans or frame them. Expressionless faces invite the viewer to imagine internal states and participate in an act of deciphering the ambiguity of being.

Chiffon is the fragile substrate stretched like canvas in Saskia Fleishman’s ethereal work that addresses the notion of landscape. It bears images captured in transitory moments, when the light coalesces in an instant. See-through portions float into being from the chiffon, while each painting contains cutout shapes that allow the viewer to see into a different time and place, as though through a gateway or portal. “I think a big part of my work is questioning what I’m seeing at all times,” she says. Viewers are invited to reconsider their own landscapes, their own reality. Organic in form, Fleishman’s ceramics, which are painted with underglaze and bisque-fired, possess the same feeling of flux and transitoriness.

Surfaces seem to delight in playing myriad visual tricks in Melinda Laszczynski’s highly tactile multimedia works. She presents a riotous dazzle of material textures, embedding glitter and dried paint skins or spray paint and crushed glass. Her work is an ongoing investigation of feminist theory, which seeps into the choice of colors—pinks and holographic rainbows—and materials; thick globs of paint harken to baking—the smear of frosting, the decadence of confectionery. Her works have the density and depth of constellations, the kinetic dynamism of an eruption. 

Graceful and balanced, Jessica Simorte’s compositions explore the psychological dimensions of space through abstractions and interiors that are suggestive rather than specific or referential. Architectural and flat in their field of space (though they deftly evoke deep space), they explore the way color impacts mood. Simorte is interested in drawing the eye to the edge, to neglected boundaries: “The margins of the paintings are really essential. Forgotten spaces. Corners of rooms. Edges of walls. I always wish that that would be more interesting in a lot of paintings. There’s so much we could do with the edges,” she says. Meanwhile, an ephemeral quality arises from the lightness of paint layers, like veils, that absorb into unprimed canvas.