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Deanna Sirlin's new media
installations result from the operation of digital
processes, but the ultimate subject of her work is one
of the oldest artistic media: painting. Sirlin's
installations are thus complex hybrids; by articulating
the qualities of painting through the possibitilies of
digital production, they define a new medium and a new
way of seeing.
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Sirlin's installations are
site-specific in the sense that each is tailored to a
particular architectural feature of a specific building:
the front grid of windows of the High Museum in Atlanta
or the large expanse of glass defining the entryway to
the palazzo that houses the Dipartmento di Scienze
Giuridiche of the Università Ca' Foscari
Venezia. Each installation begins with a small painting;
these paintings are Sirlin's abstract refractions
of her experience and perception of the site
buildings' respective interior and exterior
architectures, their atmospheres, and the cities of
which they are a part. When developing Retracings (1999)
for the High Museum, Sirlin thought not only about the
building and its windows, designed by architect Richard
Meier, but the museum's collection and the
activity on the street outside the windows. Her piece
for the New Orleans Museum of Art, 33 and a 1/3 (2001),
reflects her interest in that city's musical
culture as well as the particulars of the museum as a
physical and cultural environment. Punto di Fuga
(Vanishing Point) (2001), Sirlin's Venice
installation, derives from her engagement with the
Gothic architecture of the palazzo and her feeling for
the distinctive light and color of the city.
To create an installation from a
painting, Sirlin translates the painting digitally and,
with the help of her fabrication team, enlarges the
image by a factor of 30. This magnified image is printed
out on a clear material and installed at the site.
Because the installed image is so much larger than the
painted image, aspects of the painting's surface
that are not usually visible become available to
perception: the specific texture of each brushstroke;
the way each stroke breaks down into myriad individual
gestures; that an area of seeemingly uniform color is
made up of numerous different hues. Sirlin's style
of painting, characterized by a loaded brush, thick
impasto, vivid color, and the swirling interplay of
rounded lines and shapes, rewards this close scrutiny.
Paradoxically, an image that
begins as a reproduction of a painting similar to a
photographic transparency becomes a work of art in its
own right, with its own distinctively rich visual
rhetoric. The work's relationship to the viewer
offers a further paradox--on one hand, we achieve an
incredible intimacy not just with that painting
but with the nature and processes of painting and
of paint itself. On the other hand, the experience of
these works is so different from that of conventional
paintings that they define a new aesthetic experience,
the experience of a hybrid medium that is not painting,
yet takes painting as both its subject and its object.
The way Sirlin both alters the
scale of painting and makes transparent that which is
usually opaque completely changes the viewers'
relationship to painting. Even with large paintings, we
usually are able to maintain a certain distance, to view
the painting as something at a remove from ourselves.
Sirlin makes that kind of distance impossible to
sustain. As light passes through the transparent
material, the painting's colors flood the
interior of the building and the painting becomes
an environment in which we are
enveloped.
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