Melanie Daniel

Lotus Eaters 

Solo Exhibition at Asya Geisberg Gallery, New York

Opening reception: Thursday September 4th, 6-8pm

Melanie Daniel, In the Inch of Dusk, 2014, Oil on canvas, 55″ x 47″

Asya Geisberg Gallery is pleased to present “Lotus Eaters”, an exhibition of paintings by Canadian-Israeli artist Melanie Daniel. This newest series marks a philosophical shift within Daniel\’s oeuvre, with a retreat from her previously taut and politically charged milieu into a more languorous hallucinatory landscape. Here, Daniel encodes anxiety based on the turmoil of the Middle East with an increasingly subversive painterly language. While her preceding series “Echo Shield” alluded to an abstracted militarism and surveillance, Daniel\’s current works initially suggest an idyllic sublimity, only upon closer inspection yielding to a latent content of eerie unease. A post-apocalyptic aura emanates, where quasi-extant lone figures emerge and are in turn disembodied into the murk. The paintings posit a markedly invented language and space, where seemingly peaceful environs slowly suggest a darker edge. A caustic palette, anarchic abstraction, foreign vegetation and tangled marks fight amid a constant flurry of disparate styles. Narratives remain unwritten, as the figure is caught in an oneiric state, disconnected from its environs, unmoored or overburdened with Daniel\’s whirlwind of cryptic gestures.