someplace, somewhere

MORLEIGH STEINBERG

JANUARY 8, FEBRUARY 9

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

What began as a re-examination of the dense verdancy of traditional Irish landscape paintings, expanded upwards to billowy clouds. Through spliced and abstracted compositions, Steinberg’s  installation of kaleidoscopic gardens, dizzying vistas and blooming skies shifts the viewers perception from the recognizable to unmapped places. Her compositions hover between memory and dream. These altered terrains complicate ideas and expectations of horizon, perspective, and pictorial coherence.
Printed 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 that beckon entrance. 
Recomposing her photographs with abstract additions, Steinberg incites 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 horizon 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 someplace, somewhere else. Terrain and light, form and composition, texture and smell, all register at once, layering in my mind, as both an emotional and architectural 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 — ideas arrive and I run with them, but hurdles are welcome too. I’ve always believed that the original, single photo from which my work begins, has to be strong on its own. It serves as the foundation to what I build from, of what’s to come. From there I am confident to elaborate, transform and take the work afar. 

In 2020, I began my series Pattern Sky. I wanted to work on a larger scale, making ten foot long scroll-like pieces to hang throughout the space. Printing on paper proved too fragile for this application so I was pushed towards finding a more resilient material to work with.  Since Pattern Sky I have been exploring the myriad expressive possibilities of creating on alternative substrates. What I have been discovering is fascinating! I feel I am only just beginning this exploration.” - Morleigh Steinberg