MORLEIGH STEINBERG

JANUARY 8, FEBRUARY 9

someplace, somewhere extends Steinberg’s inquiry into the mutable borders between place and perception.

What began as a re-examination of traditional Irish landscape painting expanded upwards to billowy clouds. Through spliced and abstracted compositions, her installation of kaleidoscopic gardens, dizzying vistas and blooming skies shifts the viewers perception to unmapped places.

Her compositions hover among memory and dream as she stitches her photos into altered terrains which complicate ideas of horizon, perspective, and pictorial coherence.

Printed unconventionally on a silver mylar substrate, the work shimmers, reflects, and shifts with changing light and viewpoint. The works resist a fixed perspective, instead inviting physical engagement and active looking, where discovery emerges through motion and interaction. As the viewer moves, her images continually transform, revealing layered complexities and detail.

Using recomposed photographs and layered abstractions, Steinberg pushes the familiar into the surreal. At the center of this new series is a question of belonging: where do images live when they move between places—between Los Angeles and Ireland, between personal geography and mythic terrain?

”Open space and horizons lines- lines in general and the delineations they create, their demarcation of space, the what if’s, and simple pairings of disparate forms… These things always catch my eye . When I see something inspiring, I am simultaneously in the moment and somewhere. Terrain and light, form and composition, texture and smell all register at once, layering in my mind as both an emotional and physical experience. I’m not documenting a place so much as excavating the possibility embedded within it. This exhibit is an invitation to occupy both here and elsewhere—to move through a landscape that is simultaneously observed, invented, and felt.”

I am always conscious of what I am making, yet not entirely. The works come through sustained effort, but also from a state of flow — they arrive rather than being forced. I’ve always believed that the source photograph, the original image of any work, has to be strong on its own. It is the foundation of what’s to come. From there, I have confidence to elaborate, to transform, and to take it somewhere else.

In 2020, on the eve of the pandemic I opened “Pattern Sky”, the large scale, scroll - like work hung over 10 feet long. Paper proved too fragile and pushed me to towards finding a more resilient material. Since then I have been experimenting with alternative printing substrates. Its opened up so many possibilities. I feel like I am only just beginning this investigation!” - Morleigh Steinberg