FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Susan Holcomb, “Nightlight”
May 26 – June 30, 2007
Opening: Saturday, May 26, 6pm – 8pm
2635 S. Fairfax Avenue, Culver City, CA 90232
(310) 837 6230
E-mail, info@bandiniart.com
Web site, http://www.bandiniart.com
Open Tuesday - Saturday, 11am – 5pm
Susan Holcomb, One Hundred Billion, 2006, acrylic on canvas, 42” x 42”.
Set in the dramatic moments between sunset and nightfall, Susan Holcomb’s paintings are complex meditations on the infinite. Her luminous canvases, on show at Bandini Art from May 26, depict not only the limitless skies of the American west but also the means by which we seek to interpret them.
The expanses of land, sea and heavens that fill Holcomb’s paintings are overlaid with charts and diagrams, referencing the systems that classify our world. Mapped first in the imagination and then through math and science, the hundred billion stars that become visible at night challenge our understanding of the universe.
From the campfire stories of our ancestors, through astrology and astronomy, to astrophysics and personal readings, the symbols assigned to the stars carry different meanings. In some of Holcomb’s paintings, the grid of contemporary Los Angeles stretches to the horizon mirrored by schematics in the sky. In others the ocean, or mountains, provide the subject. The iconography floating above can be profound, or touched with humor, but is always thought provoking.
Poised between the worlds of light and darkness, science and intuition, perception and logic, the paintings pay tribute to the transcendent beauty of the natural world and our attempts, as stargazers, to “define the indefinable.”
Susan Holcomb has work in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
