Artist’s Reception: Friday, March 22, 5:30 – 7:30pm
LewAllen Galleries presents new works by Jeanette Pasin Sloan in an upcoming exhibition Life Mirrors, on view at LewAllen Galleries Downtown from March 22 – April 28, 2013. Sloan’s hyper-realistic still-life paintings and drawings celebrating domestic objects of contemporary life are acclaimed for elevating the everyday, the commonplace, to the level of the heroic. Her cannily precise depictions of highly polished household items – silver cups, vases, bowls – surrounded by and reflecting patterned textile, balance a unique tension between realism and abstraction. The design and composition of each work has a distinctly modernist appearance, even suggesting perceptual effects associated with Op Art.
Sloan’s “heroic realism” offers a new take on what is “real” and invites the viewer to probe the thin edge of abstraction, a world turned inside out. Her visual allegories of how we are reflected, both literally and metaphorically, are played out in the material objects of our lives. “With tenacity, loyalty, and skill, she has elevated this humble motif to a high level of sophistication,” said art critic Jane Cottingham of American Artist.
“Like a religious icon, these objects provoke a visual place for meditation. I consider them to be what is real—what we can hold onto in life—but in the reflections there remains what we do not know, the mysterious, that which is unsettling and perhaps chaotic. My work implies that there are many ways of seeing reality,” said Sloan. Sloan’s career literally began in the kitchen, as a young mother painting the simple objects around her, and has now reached the pinnacle of inclusion in major museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art, and the art museums of Yale and Harvard. Sloan holds a BFA from Marymount College in New York and an MFA from the University of Chicago.