REEL ART

Core Dance presents... Deanna Sirlin

 

Deanna Sirlin is an American abstract artist best known for her gestural paintings and monumental
installations. Her work prioritizes color. In her paintings, she explores how texture and composition
affect color relationships. Through her installations, she dramatically alters physical environments, using
color and light to challenge how viewers interact with space.

Education
Sirlin began her art education at the Brooklyn Museum Art School. She earned her B.A.in Art from the
State University of New York at Albany (SUNY), and her M.F.A. in Painting from Queens College. Sirlin is
a Yaddo Fellow, and in 2016 was the Rothko Foundation International Painting Symposium Artist in
Residence. In 2019 Sirlin will be an artist in Residence at the Cini Foundation in Venice, Italy
 

Technique
Though primarily a painter, Sirlin adopts any medium that allows her to explore the relationships color
has with form, composition and the physical environment. Her acrylic paintings exude a multitude of
layers, building to vibrant, complex, textural surfaces. Her process sometimes involves manipulating the
surface, allowing natural forces like gravity to affect the paint. Action is important to her mark making.
Her brush is an extension of her body. The fluid brushstrokes are often the first elements of her
paintings to catch the eye. Sirlin also works in collage and sculpture, creates public murals, writes
extensively about art, and has adapted her imagery by using digital technology to create
monumental works imbedded in glass for windows, covering buildings in the United
States, and Italy, Turkey and France.

Inspirations
Sirlin has said, “I think in terms of color, density, and the movement of stroke and light.” She endeavors
to make work that reflects the way she likes to live. She infuses her work with a search for positivity and
lust for life, and has described her paintings as having a particular “pleasure of being.” She is inspired by
opportunities to translate her work into new mediums and new environments. Her paintings helped
inspire her large-scale installations. In turn, the ways light and space interplay with the work on those
projects inspires the way she engages with paint. Digital technology also affects the way she approaches
her work.

Deanna Sirlin Statement
In an interview with Quanda Rodriguez for Catalyst magazine, Sirlin said, “For me, making art is a search
for self. With each stroke, I am rediscovering, circling and re-articulating myself. I continually dig
deeper...But, most of all, these works express for me the pleasure of being in the world. I am reinventing
that happiness in the language of painting.”
 

Exhibitions
Work by Deanna Sirlin has been shown in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States, as
well as in France, Italy, Great Britain, Germany, Turkey, Latvia and China.
 

Collections
Works by Sirlin are included in numerous institutional and private collections, including that of the High
Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia, the Mark Rothko Centre in Daugavpils, Latvia, the Shenzhen Institute
of Fine Arts in Shenzhen, China, Kunsthaus Nuremberg, Germany, and the Museum of Contemporary Art
Georgia. Her work is part of the United Airlines Collection at Dulles Airport in Washington, DC.
 

Artist in Residence

Deanna Sirlin will be an Artist in Residence for the Midtown Alliance in Atlanta from 1/1/2023 to 6/1/24

 

Atlanta Projects and Works:

 

3 Scherzi 4 Strata are three films by Nuno Veiga created in collaboration with Deanna Sirlin’s exhibition Strata at the Centro de Arte e Cultura at the Fundação Eugénio de Almeida in Évora, Portugal. This exhibition was on view during the pandemic for one full calendar year, from June 6, 2020 to June 6, 2021. The Art Center and Galleries are the former site of the court and prison of the first Inquisition dating from 1536 to 1821. Prison bars are on some of the building’s windows. The tribunal courtroom and dais are is still in their original room; and in the outside courtyard, which is filled with orange and lemon trees, is a mass grave dating from the Inquisition. Strata was conceived to be viewed in this space. The exhibition was composed of paintings, a video, and twenty transparent artworks in saturated color grids that were seamlessly applied to the large gallery windows. Through these transparencies, the viewer could see Évora, and the intense light of the Portuguese sun flooded the gallery space with large beams of color. In this moment of isolation caused by the pandemic, Strata created a new lens for the viewer to contemplate the exterior world with color and light. The gallery became a place of color, light, refection, and contemplation for the viewers, as well as reflection on the past. 

 

Yiyao Ying, a journalist based in Berlin, wrote about this exhibition for Imprint Magazine UK in 2021:

 

Strata seems to filter the passing of time. The work becomes a node that connects history and the present. The inquisition room and the prison bars surrounding the building are fixed, actual, and historical. Strata alters them, rendering them fluid, ungrounded, and dream-like. This transformation textualizes space and spacializes time.

 

Contemporary art discourse sometimes is criticized for lacking substantive ways of addressing the historical grounds of site specificity. But I see the history embedded in Strata: what happened in the past. The Japanese Ichigo-ichie philosophy that emphasizes the uniqueness of each experience is contained in the ephemeral configurations of light the installation creates.

 

Dasein, Heidegger’s way of describing the essential mode of human existence in the world, is temporal: having been "thrown" into a world implies a "pastness" in its being. But what surprises me is the transformative design. When the sun goes down, the grids start their monodrama. It is beyond impermanence and transience.” 

Sirlin’s projected passages of colored light into the gallery space from its twenty windows gave Nuno Veiga and performer Ana Silva a frame for their cinematic and performative dialogue with the Strata exhibition. Veiga and Silva developed this video dance trilogy by collaborating with Sirlin’s art at a moment when the enforced isolation of the pandemic made such collaboration that much more profound.

 

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