DEANNA SIRLIN

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS BY ATLANTA ARTIST DEANNA SIRLIN:
HIGH MUSEUM OF ART TO REINSTALL MAJOR WORK; ARTIST COMMISSIONED BY AIRPORT DEANNA SIRLIN

In 1999, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta sponsored its first competition for artists. The museum asked artists to suggest ways of using spaces not traditionally devoted to exhibition. Deanna Sirlin, the selected artist, proposed to translate her richly colored abstract paintings into a transparent film to be applied to 165 of the museums windows to produce an effect like contemporary stained glass. During the day, the work, entitled Retracings, flooded the interior of the museum with colored light. Seen from the outside at night, when illuminated from within, the installation presented two monumentally scaled painted images on the second and third floors of the museum. It literally stopped traffic on Peachtree Street as art lovers got out of their cars to look more closely.

Although initially scheduled for two months in the fall of 1999, Retracings was so successful with the public that it was held over for four additional months. The High Museum acquired Retracings for its permanent collection and will exhibit it for the first time in five years from April 2, 2005 through June 20, 2005.

The making of Retracings involved technological innovation. Sirlins original oil paintings were digitally scanned and enlarged by a factor of thirty without losing resolution, which required the development of new software. Sirlin collaborated on the process with Colorchrome, an Atlanta-based imaging firm with which she continues to work.

Retracings, which straddles the border between painting and installation as well as the border between painting and new media, was a pivotal work for Sirlin that led to multiple exhibition opportunities. Sirlin created works using the same combination of painting and technology for the New Orleans Museum of Art's Triennial, the Georgia Museum of Art, and Ca' Foscari, the University of Venice, Italy where Punto di Fuga (Vanishing Point) is installed permanently. She continues to work with this technology, with the objective of creating works that capitalize on the transparency of the image without being dependent on a window. A large, freestanding work was recently installed in the One Live Oak building on Lenox Road in Atlanta and a series of suspended circular pieces are on exhibit at Ty Stokes Gallery in Atlanta through February 26, 2005.

From September 2, 2005 through October 20, 2005, Sirlin will exhibit fifteen new, large-scale multimedia drawings in the Atrium of Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. In these vertical drawings, scaled to human proportions (six feet by two feet), Sirlin continues her innovative use of digital technology. To make the works in this exhibition, entitled In Translation, Sirlin samples passages from scanned paintings, prints them on canvas, and creates a new work by painting and drawing over the scanned images. The technology thus allows Sirlin to enter into a dialogue with her own images. The corporate sponsor for the airport exhibition is Larson-Juhl, a manufacturer of picture frames whose corporate headquarters is in Atlanta. The frames for this exhibition, specially designed to make the colors more vibrant, are reminiscent of those used by one of Sirlin's artistic heroes, the modern Italian painter Giorgio Morandi.

Deanna Sirlin's work is in the permanent collections of the High Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia, Universita Ca' Foscari Venezia (Italy), Kunsthaus Nuremberg (Germany), and the Shenzhen Institute of Fine Arts (PR China). The awards she has received for her work include a Visiting Artist Fellowship to Nuremberg, Germany, and a 1997 award for Women in the Visual Arts from the State of Georgia. Sirlin maintains her studio on a horse farm in Alpharetta, Georgia, outside of Atlanta.

The artist is available for interviews.

Email: deannasirlin@yahoo.com
Website: www.deannasirlin.com