Lori Bookstein Fine Art to Display New Gelah Penn Exhibit, Today

Lori Bookstein Fine Art is pleased to announce a new installation by Gelah Penn. This is the artist's first solo exhibition with Lori Bookstein Fine Art.

Through site-responsive installations and works on paper, Gelah Penn expands on the language of drawing in sculptural space. In the installations, she deploys a variety of synthetic materials to invade, interpret and confound the architectural parameters of a given site. The works in her Polyglot drawing series "breed internal formal and conceptual contradictions: cohesion and fragmentation, balance and vertigo, minuet and jitterbug."

For the Open Window Project, Penn has constructed Polyglot Y: Unhinged, a hybrid piece that cannibalizes and reformulates her concerns from one medium to another by incorporating digital images of installation details (including some from The Big Heat, presented at the gallery in 2011) in drawings that conform to a fractured armature filling the window. Layers of translucent, painted and reflective materials will change greatly throughout the day depending on the quality of light infusing the window. The work upends the passing viewer's expectation of the space's unique, pictorial character to a more mysterious and surprising engagement with the sculptural installation inside. Penn's great interest in film, particularly the shadowy, urban territory of film noir, informs the work.

Gelah Penn's work has been exhibited widely, including solo and group exhibitions at Smack Mellon, New York; National Academy Museum, New York; Sculpture Center, New York; Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT; Brattleboro Museum, Brattleboro, VT; Itami Museum, Japan; and Bibliotheque Municipale Louis Nucera, France. Her work is represented in the collections of the Columbus Museum, Columbus, GA; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; Brooklyn Museum Library, New York; and Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland, OH. The artist has received fellowships from the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. This year, Penn will also curate two exhibitions: object'hood at Lesley Heller Workspace, New York (co-curated by Inna Babaeva) and Diphthong at the Shirley Fiterman Art Center, New York (co-curated by Stephen Maine).

The Open Window Project was conceived as a project space by which to showcase the work of emerging artists and those artists who may not necessarily fit into the gallery's program. While the gallery has always maintained the tradition of representing a focused group of core artists, it is excited about the ways in which working with other artists through the Open Window Project will enhance the dialogue surrounding the gallery's primary agenda. The Open Window Project occupies the street front window on Tenth Avenue between 18th and 19th Streets.

Gelah Penn: Polyglot Y: Unhinged will be on view from April 30 - June 30, 2015. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, April 30th from 6:00 - 8:00 pm. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10:30 am to 6:00 pm. For additional information and/or visual materials, please contact Joseph Bunge at (212) 750-0949 or by email at joseph@loribooksteinfineart.com.­