Exhibition:  Gail Marcus Orlen: Recent Paintings

Dates:  October 21st – November 16th 2005

Opening Reception:  Fri., October 28th from 5:30-7:30 p.m.                       

Location: Temple Gallery,330 South Scott Avenue,in theTemple of Music and Art. The Temple Gallery is managed by Etherton Gallery.

Gallery Hours:  Monday-Friday, 10-6 p.m. and prior to performances

Contact:  Jerre Johnston  624-7370

Contents:
The magic realism of Gail Marcus-Orlen’s paintings offers timelessly relevant comments about the fantasy of dreams, the stuff of daily life, and currently the subjective gaze. Merging the genres of still life and landscape, Gail Marcus-Orlen’s tilted picture planes and multi-layered illusions flow together, metamorphosing into magical environments and “living dreams.”  In her new series of paintings Marcus-Orlen re-imagines the art of painting in a series of still-lifes that combine the tools of the trade, brushes and paint, with the allegorical mirror. The self reflective notation in Marcus-Orlen’s work began with her own mirrored gaze and eventually evolved into other eyes from famous Renaissance paintings by Leonardo Da Vinci, Piero Della Francesca, and Angelo Bronzino. The collective expressions of the artists whose portraits she quoted began to coalesce in a visionary tableau of reflection, and as she states, “the Renaissance and imagination merged into the canvas in front of me.”

With her brightly hued memoirs of things past and present Marcus-Orlen pulls us in, making us participants in the act of viewing and imagining. Known for her longstanding interest in magical, surreal environments, Marcus-Orlen takes the most common household objects: plants, furniture, animals, children’s multi-colored balls, releases them from any gravitational pull, and weaves them into an allegorical narrative of the “familiar-made-strange.” Bound more by ironic association, than their physicality, her juxtapositions of objects, shadowy figures and mannequin forms, charge the domestic environment with the possibility for mystery.

Formal elements include geometric divisions and off-center compositions. Inverted triangles, and picture frames bordered by patterned walls contain the images and create a sense of equanimity for the activity within. Complicate passages intermingle in her still-life’s, mixed fruit cascades in a waterfall of drapes, while in another apples, oranges, and houses perform in a stage like setting, lighted by a vivid palette of complimentary hues. As the real and the imagined muse in Marcus-Orlen’s suggestive realms, her layering of illustration and illusion suggests an enigmatic sense of linkage to the realm of the physical and the fabulous.