An amalgamation of photography and painting

Haunch of Venison gallery hosts the first ever UK exhibit of renowned American artist Isca Greenfield-Sanders. Entitled ‘Second State’, it includes new paintings, which explore the metaphorical and physical enormity of landscape, as well as the power of the medium of painting so as to convey across the sublime. Here is a quick look at the artist’s eclectic oeuvre:

• Isca Greenfield-Sanders completed her graduation from Brown University in 2000 with a B.A. in Math and a B.A. in Visual Arts. Her work was the subject of a two-person exhibition at the Museum Mosbroich in Leverkusen, Germany in 2006 and a solo at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver in 2010.
  
• The painter uses vintage slides as the starting point for her multi-layered paintings. The imagery is universally recognizable, culled from snapshots taken by amateur photographers. These paintings are unified by the large scale of their subject matter that ranges from a mountain peak to the swell of the ocean, from an aerial view of the landscape to the televised moment man landed on the moon.
  
• On view are new paintings - a continuation of her interest in the relationship between photography and painting as well as the transformative effect of scale and medium change in image making. Part of her interest lies in how the amateur photograph fails to depict the magnitude of these subjects and how through the meticulous process of painting, enlarging and repainting each image, she can more powerfully depict the experience.
  
• The artist has used a photograph of an unknown mountain range marred by a lens flare as the starting point for ‘Mountain Flare’ - an example of what she describes as ‘the cavernous gap between the majestic landscape and its photographic documentation’. The color flare both gestures towards the presence of the photographer and enhances the composition. The painting’s bottom half is rendered abstractly in pure black, ultramarine blue and bright orange, while the top half of the painting is more photographic.
  
• ‘Moon Landing’ is based on a photograph of a television screen as the moon landing was broadcast in 1969. The original photograph is out of focus, the subject obscured by Moiré lines. Greenfield-Sanders is fascinated by the fact that the desire to capture such a remarkable historical event drove the photographer to shoot a black and white TV screen—such a beautiful and hopeless gesture.” The lunar landscape, seemingly viewed through a key hole, appears lit from within, rendered by the artist in shades of blue.