"the dark lintels, the blue and foreign stones
of the great round rippled by stone implements
the midsummer night light rising from beneath
the horizon- when I said "a cleft of light"
I meant this. And this not Stonehenge
simply nor any place but the mind"-Adrienne Rich, Twenty-One Love Poems
Camille Obering Fine Art is pleased to present “A Cleft of Light” an exhibition of new paintings by New Orleans - based artist Mallory Page. The new body of work explores the divide between the physiological and the psychological, specifically the moment of clarity and consciousness which subtly reveals itself between these two spaces. Page references the line “a cleft of light” from Adrienne Rich's poem, “XXI Love Poems" to unveil these sentiments in her ethereal paintings.
Over the last few years, Page has made a discourse between the physiological and psychological, while beginning to observe a psychic impulse in her work. It begins in these paintings at the time of day when there is one last sliver of multi-colored light left in the sky, though already dark outside. Enamored with the subdued rainbow phenomena, its brevity, and how the earth uses light to mark a transition, this work responds to an urgency for magic as an individual and part of collective consciousness. It attempts to animate light and entangle it with how we receive and respond to visceral emotions.
In representing the atmospheric presence of the psyche, these environment-creating scaled works are composed of thin layers of acrylic washes. Light is spatially considered in two ways: as backgrounds meant to pull a viewer in as refuge or as space in the forefront, where they become ghosts or vapors. These shadows are illuminated and therefore exposed. There is a duality to what light forms can be.
