Sharon Lawless: Slightly Ajar

Sharon Lawless
Circle Master, 2014
Collage on museum board
40" x 32" (1.04m x 81cm)

In Slightly Ajar, her second exhibition with the gallery, Sharon Lawless continues to use found materials — discarded packaging, paint samples, wrapping paper and altered pages from auction catalogs — in her manipulation of two modern traditions, collage and geometric abstraction as she explores the tension between accident and control and how this tension effects perception.

In contrast to the undetermined spaces in earlier work, that had more to do with and awareness of time than of space, the 10 collages in this exhibition exist in a space that is more disorienting than ambiguous, defined by multiple perspectives and continuity errors. Beginning with random arrangements on the paper Lawless develops each composition with equal influence from the attributes of the materials and her arrangement of each found element, acting and reacting to achieve the desired optical effects. Her method of making work, like the images she creates, oscillates between the rational and irrational. Lawless writes, “I’m attempting to engage the viewer by exploring spatial and color relationships, scale, the similarity between packaging and architecture, and the ways that manipulating visual logic can animate what we see.”

Sharon Lawless received her BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA in 1974 and her MFA from the University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH in 1976. She is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting and an NEA/SECCA Artists' Fellowship. She lives and maintains her studio in New York, NY.