“The act of making the paintings is slow, at times methodical. The paint is applied with squeegees and knives, creating thick transparent glazes. The edges of color butt up against each other. There is a physicality to the way the colors meet and edges interlock.”—Zoe Walsh
Zeit Contemporary Art is pleased to present Remote Light, a selection of new work by Zoe Walsh. This exhibition, curated by Bianca Boragi, showcases a new series of vibrant paintings where Walsh employs a palette of cyan, magenta, and yellow glazes to sequentially build planar layers and depth.
Walsh’s work is an investigation of intermediality through hyper-vivid acrylic paintings in which refracted screens and translucent entities anchor each other to the space of the canvas. Immersive and unsettling, Remote Light connotes a sensual recollection of cinematic realities, like a memory, replayed and reprojected across the scrim of one’s closed eyes.
In this new body of work, Walsh uses silhouettes reproduced from still photographs taken on the set of Falcon Studios’ Ramcharger (1984). The photographs, held by the ONE Archives in Los Angeles, construct a fantasy of masculine mobility, encounter, and semi-public sex in an expansive desert landscape.
Walsh’s process of production shifts between the digital worlds of SketchUp and Photoshop and the physical realm of acrylic painting. The compositions utilize photographic and filmic devices, such as multiple exposures and image burns. Figures become ghostly shapes or gaps that contribute to an element of instability in the spatial illusion. Moments in which the paint asserts its materiality act as additional instances of interference in this construction.
Walsh states that “the act of making the paintings is slow, at times methodical. The paint is applied with squeegees and knives, creating thick transparent glazes. The edges of color butt up against each other. There is a physicality to the way the colors meet and edges interlock.” This process yields paintings that situate the spectator in a field of projection, oscillating between interior and exterior in relationship to a hybrid and tenuous embodiment.
Zoe Walsh earned their MFA in Painting/Printmaking from Yale University in 2016 and their BA in Art History and the Visual Arts from Occidental College in 2011. During the 2016-17 academic year, they were a Harriet Hale Woolley Fellow at the Fondation des États-Unis in Paris, France. This work led to a solo exhibition at the Fondation des États-Unis in 2017. At Yale, Walsh was awarded the Al Held Travel Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome (2015). Their work has been exhibited at ltd los angeles, Los Angeles, La Maison des Arts, Malakoff, France, Alfred University, Alfred, New York, Abrons Art Center, New York, Yve YANG Gallery, Boston, and Pieter Performance Space, Los Angeles. Walsh is a lecturer at the University of California, San Diego.
