Isca Greenfield-Sanders:

Light Leaks

Isca Greenfield-Sanders: Light Leaks featured paintings from the artist's Light Leaks series, based on found photographs from the 1950s and ‘60s. These paintings utilize certain inaccuracies of film photography that have been eliminated by digital media. Greenfield-Sanders has chosen pictures that reveal flaws produced in the process of capturing an image. Inspired by the effects of the camera’s color banding, over-exposure and light leaks, the artist is taking her process a step further by creating similar visual flaws in her paintings. Troubling our assumptions of how photography and painting can function, Greenfield-Sanders reveals the contours of each medium, pushing her work into an ambiguous realm between the two, and delighting and baffling the viewer along the way. What we see is deceptively not what we think we see.

According to Greenfield-Sanders, she has “developed a technique that is basically a combination of watercolor, oil paintings, and photography—it pushes all three of those mediums onto one canvas.” Her process involves several steps: beginning with a found photograph, she scans and edits the picture then reworks the resulting image into a small study with watercolors and pencils. She then enlarges and reprints the study in parts on rice paper where each piece then adheres like a tile onto a canvas. Finally, she will apply oil paint all over the image—intentionally leaving evidence of the grid “tiles” in the final painting—an indication of her preference for utilizing a methodical system for creating her images.

Isca Greenfield-Sanders was born in 1978 in New York, New York. This was the artist’s first solo museum exhibition. Her work has been exhibited at The Museum Morsbroich, Germany and MoMA PS1, New York. Her works are included in the collections of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Brooklyn Museum; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco.