Lynn Talbot
	Paintings 14 October - 14 November, 2005 Opening: Friday, 14 October, 7-9pm   Press Release Pierogi is pleased to present Lynn Talbot’s first one-person exhibition. Talbot's paintings seductively juxtapose realistic, small-scale still lifes with formal shapes and text. Talbot’s technique and imagery recalls Seventeenth Century Dutch and Sixteenth Century Spanish painters (such as Willem Kalf, Gerrit Willemsz. Heda, and Francisco de Zurbaran), as well as the tradition of American still life and trompe l’oeil painting by artists such as William Harnett and Raphaelle Peale. Rather than viewing the history of painting as baggage to be overcome, Talbot uses historical painting techniques to her advantage by contrasting earlier still life motifs against more recent aspects of formal abstraction. Talbot makes the still life genre new and her own in her unique compositions. Talbot also recognizes the capacity of still life to communicate narrative and metaphysical ideas, which it has not generally been credited with. I have become interested in the use of still life as symbolic for my own narrative ideas. It’s a great medium for this because the inherent blankness of many objects allows you to impose your own intent upon them. It also has to do with how a smaller reality can be viewed within a larger reality that is imagined or abstract. (Talbot, 2005) In Fifth A Day the square shaped canvas is divided into fifths. The upper four fifths are variously colored segments of radiating lines. The bottom fifth is a still life composition resting on a wooden shelf, consisting of four pears, one cantaloupe, a patterned napkin, and two wine glasses; one half filled with water, the other empty and upside-down. The composition could be read as a vanitas painting achieved using not only typically symbolic items—the half full glass, the empty glass—but also the more abstract reference to a fifth of alcohol—represented by the five segments of the painting—and the knowledge of the damage that a “fifth a day” can do to one. Of the still life genre Meyer Schapiro writes The work of art is itself an ostensible object of handling like certain of the simulated and real objects that compose it. Without a fixed place in nature and submitted to arbitrary and often accidental manipulation, the still life on the table is an objective example of the formed but constantly rearranged, the freely disposable in reality and therefore connate with the idea of artistic liberty. (Schapiro, 1968. “The Apples of Cezanne: An essay on the meaning of still life”) More recently, Talbot has become interested in how optically interesting painting can relate to the optical illusion of still lifes. This is reflected in the op-art imagery—such as circles and diamonds, or radiating shapes, filled with concentric lines of color—incorporated into some of her recent still lifes.
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	P   I   E   R   O   G   I     2   0   0   0 177 north 9th street brooklyn, ny 11211 718.599.2144 noon to 6p friday through monday and by appointment pierogi 2000 is an innovative art gallery in williamsburg, brooklyn, new york