Linda Gallagher

Junior Projects is pleased to present Short Timing the Dawn, an exhibition of new paintings by Linda Gallagher. Gallagher interweaves disparate ideas, experiences, and inspirations on expansive canvases. She equalizes high/low cultural hierarchies and connects her subject matter in physical maps of contemporary stream-of-consciousness thought as mediated through the act of painting. Gallagher commeasures porn stars, celebrity chef infotainment, and haute couture online shopping alongside flora, felines, and quirky self-portraiture. Her paintings are analogous to a computer screen simultaneously displaying several open windows, and are, in many ways, a visual manifestation of the contemporary brain: absurdist, frenzied, and perpetually multitasking. Her brushwork is confident but not over-determined in keeping with the freshness of the thoughts and personally subjective connections she renders into paint. Her palette consists primarily of earth tones—neutral browns, blacks, greens, and blues. The effect of the paint is wet, a muted jungle of oil and ideas.

In “Fight Off Your Demons,” an elongated vine, inspired in part by the flora of Negril, twists through the canvas and loosely divides it into two sections featuring mirrored subjects: for example, a facedown male figure serving as a tabletop for bad boy chef Matty Matheson's doughnuts is matched by a facedown self portrait of the artist herself. The artist’s mackerel tabby cat watches doughnuts float across her laptop (Instagram personality @chloe_spigole) in humorous dialogue with #jamuk, chef Andy Ricker’s Siamese cat, donning decorated cone and cast (@pawkhrua), anthropomorphizing the cat mind and suggesting a link between human and feline desire. In “Stoya Dreams,” Gallagher culls an image from the magazine Richardson of the porn star Stoya, who embodies the self-empowerment of female sexuality in contemporary pornography. Stoya’s legs are spread to reveal her vagina, from which flow pale pink leaves. Beside her Gallagher references a rectangular form suggestive of the canvas itself, a container for the ephemerality of the artist’s conscious and unconscious thoughts and equally a reference to the boundaries of a photograph as its own container for ideas and form.

Linda Gallagher holds a MFA from Yale University and a BFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University. Her work has been exhibited in New York and Connecticut and has also appeared in publications such as NY Art Beat, Two Coats of Paint, and Art City.