LISA
SIGAL
BUILDING DWELLING THINKING
APRIL 24 -
MAY 29, 2010
Opening reception: Saturday, April 24, from 6 to 8 pm
NOMA Gallery is pleased to present “ Building Dwelling Thinking”, new works by Lisa Sigal.
The title “Building Dwelling Thinking” comes from an essay written by Heidegger in 1954. Heidegger examines the meaning of being through built and constructed space. The text is a reference for the artist’s thought process, defining space as a conditional state. Armed with the languages of painting and architecture, Sigal’s work materializes the spaces between and within built structures.
Sigal makes her work with window screens, canvases, stretchers, chairs and hinges. The work uses a provisional relationship to material and color to build a painting space. SIgal’s paintings and painted structures shift form and claim space while offering richly ambiguous points of view. In Heiddeger’s essay he asks, “What is it to dwell?” “How does building belong to dwelling?” SIgal stretches this line of questioning. Her work asks the viewer, “How does building belong to painting? Can a painting be a dwelling? What is it to dwell?”
The window screen paintings are weightless paintings to be looked through. They hover above and in front of things and walls, incorporating the periphery into the frame. The transparency and lightness of the material has a way of coloring sight and at times creating a field of magnetic impulses when one screen crosses another. Lightness has a weight. Lightness offers the possibility of unexpected shifts for the viewer.
Lisa Sigal received her MFA in Painting from the Yale University School Of Art. She has exhibited extensively throughout the United States. Sigal was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial and had a major installation called “Line Up” at the New Museum in 2009, both in New York City. Past and upcoming projects include P.S.1, LAX Art, The Sculpture Center, Frederieke Taylor Gallery and the Aldrich Museum. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.