Celebrate the launch of Issue 2 at Hallwalls during the opening of two new exhibitions by artists Katie Bell and Sarah Sutton. Learn More ››

Artists' Talks start at 8:00 p.m. in the Cinema
Exhibitions continue through February 28.

This exhibition by Ithaca-area artist Sarah Sutton will feature a series of monochromatic oil paintings that combine representational imagery with distortions and abstractions that create scenarios in flux. They are essentially landscape paintings, but Sutton's treatment of the landscape toys with its sense of space and the notion of the built vs. the natural environment. Figurative forms occasionally emerge from the complex hybrid imagery, though they are frequently camouflaged or overwhelmed within the scenic cacophony. Her work depicts moments of collusion and collision that are not intrinsically meant to go together. It is within the resulting ambiguity that Sutton attempts to address how histories, boundaries, and skins can dissolve into one another.

As she has said, "I imagine in-between spaces, scalar fluidity, and psychic spaces, where the private and public realm collapse. Most of the time the question centers on combining spaces or moments that aren't meant to go together, letting them collude, collide and clash and then looking for pattern, resonance and schematic visual structures that emerge as I paint. The subject matter centers on the complex history of capitalism, the movement and extraction of natural resources, as well as speculative futures."

www.sarahsutton.net
www.interaliamag.org/interviews/sarah-sutton/

Katie Bell’s exhibition is a site-specific installation conceived of as a one-act drama starring anonymous artifacts. Functioning like a theatrical set, the gallery holds static characters that reference the interior architecture of corporate and commercial spaces. Sculptural objects are often fractured or untethered to a contextual structure. Functioning as a whole, the individual artefacts are a nod to players on a stage, held captive in space and time. 

Bell’s visual language is partially inspired by the work of Constructivist artists including Alexandra Ekster, Malevich and El Lissitzky's 'Proun Room.' Her work often incorporates flat planes and shapes with hard edges, but never in isolation. Individual objects stack, pierce, lean and push one another, jockeying for space.

Movement and suspension are equally courted, as Bell’s arrangement suggests passageways and thoroughfares that draw a viewer through the installation while revealing small moments and tableaux along the way. Noting Hallwalls’ origin as the hallway space between the studios of Charles Clough and Robert Longo, Bell’s interest pulls from ideas of how space is partitioned, connected and organized. Bio:Born 1985 Rockford, IL

Lives and works in New York, NY

katiebellstudio.com