Night Gallery is thrilled to present Is She Is She Psychic an exhibition of new work by Mira Dancy, featuring Miles Huston and Amelia Saddington.
In Is She Is She Psychic Mira Dancy begins by imagining an ad campaign for a fictional fragrance Herfume Perfume. As soon as the name is spoken it unravels, however, and the riddle intrinsic to the name interrupts the product paradigm. Fumes are characteristically pungent, dangerous, and decidedly not fragrant... so perhaps Herfume suggests no perfume at all, but the scent of a woman “as-is". A billboard-like image emblazons the gallery wall, and neons evoke images of storefronts and commercial signage. While these gestures conjure a physical feeling of the street and how the image of a woman is still so often reduced to a symbolic currency, the paintings describe a psychological and linguistic realm that resists quick narrative summation.
The paintings take cues from our daily digital experience, and every image incorporates some degree of distortion, overlay, or cancelation. Competing bold, graphic gestures race to be viewed first. Certain images repeat or transform from one painting to the next, sometimes creating the feeling of a cinematic flashback, other times simulating the iconographic logic of advertising. The feeling of satisfaction associated with the act of recognizing a shape or an image gets compounded by the follow-up sensation of seeing the same image polluted, retracted, or negated. Color is used as a means to saturate the images, and blues, purples, and reds are deployed specifically to call up the look of neon in a darkened window at night...
Somehow the words PSYCHIC and OPEN are the only ones that stick. To further process this pictorial notion, Mira Dancy has invited Amelia Saddington and Miles Huston to participate. The three artists live and work in an overlapping vicinity in NYC and have shared images of psychic import directly related to time spent standing in the street and taking a photograph.
