21 Apr 2013

Ceres Gallery Presents Chalda Maloff

NY, NY - Ceres Gallery is pleased to present Search Engines: New Digital Paintings by Chalda Maloff, in the Texas artist's first solo exhibit in New York City. Maloff states, 'This new series of work is dedicated to our most basic and timeless need: the search for personal insight, clarity, and meaning.'

Maloff employs the powerful aesthetic potential of the computer to create images that elicit emotion and spirituality. Each painting in this series addresses a particular approach that people have used across time and cultures in their search for meaning. For example, 'Lucid Dream' explores the fleeting clarity sometimes experienced when emerging from slumber, while 'Seeing Without Looking' examines the waking search for intuition which is an element of many spiritual traditions. 'The abstract geometric shapes governing each composition,' she says, 'suggest the forms employed in ceramics, crafts, or weavings fashioned by the earliest artisans. These forms were perhaps the first expressions of timeless existential thoughts.'

Surfaces of the artworks appear solid, then liquid, smooth, then highly textured, rippling, and sometimes reflective, suggesting the deeper shifting patterns of the fabric of life. Shapes and forms vary from organic and timeless, to blatantly pixelated and contemporary. The visual effect of backlighting or inner glow engenders a feeling of gratification and openness to experience, as it has done from the ages of sun/fire worship through the age of device/screen worship. Juxtaposition, transparency, and spatial ambiguity pose a bid for viewer involvement and discovery.

Chalda Maloff's work has been exhibited throughout North and South America, and in Europe. Her recent solo exhibits have been at the Houston Jung Center in Texas and Morris Graves Museum of Art in California.

She holds a doctorate in Human Ecology, and she resides in Austin, Texas.