MICHELE ZALOPANY
EIDETIC VESTIGES

October 28 - December 4, 1999
Artist’s reception : Thursday, October 28, 6 - 8 p.m.

The work of Michele Zalopany will be featured this month at Associated American Artists from October 28th through November 27th. Her first solo exhibition with the gallery will encompass eight recent large-scale pastel paintings whose origins are based on vintage photographs. Within the past fifteen years, she has participated in major international exhibitions including the Whitney Biennial in 1989 and Drawing the Line against AIDS, an exhibition under the aegis of the 45th Biennale in 1993. Her work has been included in numerous well-publicized museum and gallery exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe such as those organized by the San Francisco Museum of Art and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.

Born in 1955, Zalopany spent much of her childhood in Detroit before moving to New York in the 70’s. As a child, she began collecting postcards and photographs, creating a personal archive with which to explore her interest in the past. The images she finds are the springboard for her ideas. She often finds these sources by sifting through material, piecing together the remains that bear personal psychological and aesthetic value.

Zalopany’s fascination with anonymous visual references stand as psychological steppingstones in her work. The photographs which inspire her paintings are diverse in their style, genre and historical content (they can be of geographic, scientific, ancient and modern content). In spite of their origin, her work avoids didactic or narrative explication. She often adds or omits compositional elements found in the original work. She may distort light and space, or alter perspective in the process of reinterpretation. An inherent and constant quality in her paintings is the coupling of reality and notion, idea or theory. The dichotomy between familiar and unknown, palpable and immaterial, order and deviation alludes to our existence between two distinct, yet parallel worlds.

In the painting Between Heaven and Earth, 1999, the title suggests an elusive place hovering between the tangible and metaphysical. Based on a news photo, the richly toned black and white image depicts a group of people assembled behind a fireman who connects the lines to a water tower. Above them, the tower projects two powerful jets of water ascending towards the heavens. Darks, lights, shadows and reflections form a densely textured surface, exuding an otherworldly glow that radiates from within. The image may call forth our attention to the event around which these people are gathered, but something seems amiss. Although the bystanders converge to watch this event, they are remote and detached from what is occuring before them. We are uncertain what they are watching and why they are there. The scene appears ordinary upon immediate observation, but as we continue to look, it becomes more complex and enigmatic.

Zalopany’s work continously probes issues involving reality and perception. We are prompted to bring many interesting associations to the table, when we visually and psychologically explore her work. Rapit Hora Diem, 1999, translated from Latin meaning "hours seize day", demonstrates an image which provokes personal interpretation. The painting portrays two men in a split-second moment of an acrobatic act. A caucasian man wearing a light shirt and dark pants is bending over, while a dark suited African-American man jumps over his shoulders. The leap-frog imagery is a beautiful composition of alternating darks and lights. It captures a precise moment of action aptly portraying the figures’ corporeal movement through space. The action of one man literally jumping over the other and the progression of movement is an interesting one. The humor and "lightness" on one hand and the suggestive connotations challenge our perceptions.

The work entitled Etiam Nos Sumus In Arcadia, 1999, strangely mirrors the ancient human quandry: why are we here? where are we going? Again we are faced with a plethora of questions for which we have no answers. The work’s riddling title, "We Too Are in Paradise" is transposed as the text of a sign within a rectangular exhibition box containing five primate skeletons, two of them human. Their forms project out and hover with a eerie starkness against a dense, opaque blackness. This work is based on a reproduction from a Rumanian natural history book. In this work as with others, Zalopany subtly addresses issues of natural order. "Etiam Nos Sumus In Arcadia" provokes an open ended debate regarding our anthropocentric perspective, the continuity of the life/death cycle, and Darwin’s theory of evolution. This reference of presenting scientific specimens is now regarded with as much curiosity as an odd documentation of a crowd gathered at the scene of a water display. When we look at Zalopany’s work, we continue to test the waters of our perceptions.

 

Gallery contact: Lisa Hagani
email: aaa@agrp.com
 
     

artist biography     press release  

gallery collections | exhibitions | contact us | guest book | home

© 1997 Associated American Artists, 20 West 57th Street, New York, New York 10019
Tel: (212) 399-5510 ..... Fax: (212) 582-9697..... Toll Free (US) 888-44 NYART
E-mail: aaa@agrp.com
A Division of The Associated Group.

---

Web site Design and Developed by Chariot Productions,
a Division of Applied Business Computers.
Site maintained by Synetex.
Any problems with this site should be reported to Synetex.