Exhibits & Events

In Second Sight, Sarah Gamble continues to explore inner and outer worlds through her signature approach to painting, incorporating bold color choices and intricate netted patterns that move her work in new directions. Using both abstract and representational strategies, Gamble builds on her previous paintings of intricately layered dots and energy bursts that conjure a universe abundant with celestial bodies (at times forming patterns that suggest human ones) as well as more terrestrial images of dense foliage that are nonetheless otherworldly. According to Gamble, the dots can be understood as atomized matter depicting the re-organization of animate and inanimate objects into new states of being as they enter into other dimensions.

Followers of Gamble’s art will discern a noticeable shift in palette—purples and bright reds at times trade places with her trademark white constellations and dot trails. Leafy plants fluctuate from green to blue to red.  Crystals and gemstones might be the central subject of a smaller painting, or be nestled and hidden amongst a painting of a larger forest scene. The unusual coloration of the plant paintings and their minute details conjure glowing mineral collections under the fluorescent light in a natural history museum display whereby the invisible is made visible. The intense colors might also evince an illuminating force projecting on the dense thicket or emanating from within. The notion of energies or other dimensions hidden or obscured—and then revealed—is threaded throughout. Paintings are related to one another whereby one might be an enlarged detail of a microcosm of another, or a rendition of the life force lying within a sister painting.

Paintings incorporating net-like dotted formations recall both Ruth Asawa’s wire sculptures, and modernist biomorphic shapes. Gamble likens these signature dots to the beads of an abacus whose calculations are more biographical divination than mathematical problem-solving: an effort to determine the best way to move through a given moment in time.