The paintings and drawings of Hope Gangloff faithfully illustrate a life lived. Though drawn from casual snapshots, each work suggests a constructed mise-en-scene whose actors, props and sets have been drawn directly from central casting. Equitably the artist assigns each individual element a starring role. Every scrap of wallpaper, each cigarette or paper lantern, every expression and gesture is lavished with care and attention. The fixed gaze and concentration of detail serves to heighten and intensify the moment. It is this same obsessive attention to detail that propels the work beyond the familiar into the realm of the surreal.
In this case the discomfort produced is not from a sense that something is wrong, just the opposite in fact, in Hope Gangloff’s world everything is exactly right.
Gallery II will feature the work on paper of Blaze Lamper. With equal precision, Lamper imagines a dreamscape of dark forests, feral beasts, and fractured time. As extraordinary in their rendering as their subject matter, each piece feels like a repressed memory which will inevitably resurface again and again and again.
