Gay Outlaw: Structure and Void

New York Gallery

Gay Outlaw’s work in photography and sculpture explores form through structure, pattern, and translation. Her process often begins with a photograph. Carrying a camera wherever she goes, she shoots anything that catches her eye. Once the film is developed, forms that would otherwise go unnoticed are revealed in the juxtaposition or cropping of mundane objects.

Outlaw distills the shape or pattern and re-works it in a variety of media: rubber, cardboard, vinyl, wood, glass. Everyday material manipulated with considerable labor and skill results in complicated formality. Structural complexity leads to optical complexity. Within each work, familiar materials and unfamiliar forms are perfectly integrated, tweaking perception and denying you the comfort of trusting the veracity of your experience.

From piece to piece, each re-thinking of the original form leads to another re-conception. Each shift in scale, material or dimension is made with such sensitivity and consideration that no matter how extreme or unexpected, it seems logical, even inevitable.

Gay Outlaw was born in Mobile, Alabama, and lives and works in San Francisco. She has had solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Art, University of California Long Beach, and Mills College Art Museum. She has been included in group shows at the Berkeley Art Museum; the Bronx Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; the University of California, Los Angeles; California College of Arts; and the Sculpture Center in New York.