Gelah

Penn

Gelah Penn is a mixed-media artist using a myriad of materials to create site-specific assemblage installations. There is a psychological uneasiness to the material-based abstractions that she creates. Influenced by films and novels, Penn creates oblique narratives with minimal color palettes that have small pops of color. Foggy layers of translucent fabrics and plastics drape across surfaces, reflections are cast onto existing architecture, and elements of the material reach to the floor, further breaking the fourth wall for her viewers.  

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For the past 30 years, I have worked at the intersection of drawing, painting, and sculpture. Deploying lightweight, synthetic materials in constructed drawings and site-responsive installations, I foreground internal formal and conceptual contradictions: substance and immateriality, cohesion and fragmentation, object and image. Through cutting, layering, stapling, and stretching polyester mesh, plastic garbage bags, Mylar, optical plastics, and mosquito netting in a piece or throughout a site, I examine the nature of shadow, light, and visual ambiguity. The resulting expansive assemblages evoke sensations ranging from the theatrical to the forensic. My aim is to choreograph events of perceptual incident and psychological unease.

My hope is that this conflation of disparate parts—mark, shadow, geometry, gesture, concord, dissonance—results in some sort of vertiginous whole. The constant reformulation of my ideas has become a significant engine for my development as an artist. It is a phenomenological approach that emphasizes atmosphere, form, and visual experience. My interest in film and fiction, especially film noir, informs the work. Endless childhood hours watching movies molded me as surely as the works in my personal art historical canon.

Gelah Penn

Gelah Penn was born in 1951 in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. She is currently based in West Cornwall, Connecticut.