"Tropicalia"

at Roebling Hall, April 14, 2001 - May 7, 2001

"Double Palm"

(2001)

Roebling Hall is extremely pleased to announce the solo exhibition of the colorful, eye-bending painting of CADENCE GIERSBACH. Titled "Tropicalia," Giersbachs stunningly innovative work draws on a welter of cultural references among them conceptual art, installation art, architecture, photography and computer graphicsto articulate her unique vision of an amplified, up-to-date, hybrid painting practice.

Taking as her starting point a set of snap shots the artist took of an empty theme park outside of Madras, India, Giersbach recreates the falsified nature of this Western transplant to the East inside the precincts of an equally rarefied cultural space: the contemporary art gallery.

Aided by a continuous, environmental wall painting, Giersbach rearranges the visual "facts" of this slightly unreal, domesticated tropical evironment into a new, fragmented, illusionistically painted whole. Using lushly colored enamel on padded vinyl supports, Giersbach puzzles together these images of cultural and visual dislocation into both a series of dazzling single works and a disquieting, wrap-around environmental piece.

Blurring the boundaries between the local and the global, the natural and the artificial, the real and the imaginary, Cadence Giersbach resolves in her graphically powerful, seductively rich paintings to scramble standard notions of pictorial space and location. Recreating in "Tropicalia" a nearly perfect visual analogue to the cultural disorientation experienced on encountering the weird simulacra of an Indian theme park, Cadence Giersbachs warping, perspective shifting, vibrantly colored paintings posit a final, even larger-scaled pictorial illusion: an image of the ongoing, globalizing superimposition of one type of culture and cultural display onto another.

"Lion"

(2001)

"Fountain"

(2001)

"Spirit Monkeys"

(2001)

Adriana Arenas - Erik Benson - Jane Benson - Sebastiaan Bremer - Paul Campbell - Christoph Draeger

RoeblingHall.com ::

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