Unfortunately, I could not find picutres of the majority of the art that is part of the show, but I found a few.
Bouquet
84x124 in. 2009
St. Francis /Sea Changes
96x164 in. 2011
Iceberg/Self Portrait on the Island of Ineffectual Voices
82x120 in. 2012
The striking thing about these pieces, in addition to a strong abstract style, is their size; it's hard to get a sense of that while looking at an online picture, but the real thing is impressive. There is something about getting dwarfed by a massive wall of colors and shapes, and then staring at it, trying to figure out what the whole thing means.
The Handwerker Gallery has this to say about Bellan-Gillen's show:
"re(Collection) presents a provocative body of work that is elegant and sumptuous, both in form and content. This solo-show is the inaugural exhibition of the Handwerker's 2012-2013 calendar. Patricia Bellan-Gillen's work is at once sensitive and provocative, large in scale and minute in detail, earthly and atmospheric. Bellan-Gillen engages her audience visually and intellectually as she shares a lexicon of personal symbols with her large-scale collage and hand-rendered works."
I agree with whoever wrote this, in that the work that I saw did have a certain elegance about it. Not the martini glass and conservative-yet-sexy-dress kind of elegance, but the sophistication mixed with aesthetic beauty. Which is, I guess, a less exciting - although valid - way to describe the martini girl. Her pieces have a certain 'look' about them, the tight graphite detail, and then the loose abstract figures.
She has titled this show 're(Collection)' and, though I don't remember exactly what her artist's statement said, she wanted these pieces to be about memories.
When I look at these pieces, I think of how our memories get distorted when we look back on them. How, when we remember, things could either be a lot worse in our heads, or better than they actually were. For example, a child's recollection of Disneyland is probably nothing short of all the magic Disney promises you. But that child, in 5 years, isn't going to remember how ridiculously hot Florida gets, or that he was terrified of a certain roller coaster before the wave of adrenaline hit his tiny brain. We tend to gloss over certain aspects of things when we remember them, and distort things.
Entering the gallery was a bit like entering a different world; it was filled with strange things that I'd never seen before. I don't pretend to understand the art that I was looking at, but I could guess, and that is the beauty of art; it relies on the beholder to make it mean something.
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