Odetta Gallery Extends Debra Pearlman Exhibition

Project:ARTspace and ODETTA presents a weekly Gallery Focus featuring works in our current exhibition, A Kind of Language, as well as some of Debra's backstory. A significant work that was proposed, but never realized was Rapunzel at Dearborn Station in the early '80s when Pearlman was based in Chicago.

Fairy tales have provided a wellspring of ideas for Debra's works throughout her career. Now strongly inferred in several of the large scale archival pigment prints in A Kind of Language, it was important to circle back to learn more about this early work.

Debra Pearlman has been inspired by fairy tales for the better part of her career as a feminist artist and mother.For Pearlman, "Fairy tales are a part of the magic of childhood - a world in which to disappear: a world of stories that are so very visual. Here is real, identifiable fear, and unusual powers granted sometimes. If childhood is about anything, it is about a lack of power, a vulnerability, our inability to alter events and unfairness - both real and imagined."

When composing the exhibition A Kind of Language, ODETTA Director Ellen Hackl Fagan invited Debra Pearlman to bring this yet unexhibited series of photographs together as a solo exhibition. Project: ARTspace is the ideal location to pull this series together, focusing on the photographs themselves, for the first time. The images of children, often dressed in iconic colors, or costumes, and postures, recall immediately recognizable subjects in art history, all by chance. The humor that erupts due to Pearlman's nuanced observations, offers the cautionary reminder that a controlling hand, whether wanted or not, is but a short distance away.

Pearlman's photographs of children exemplify the "captured moment" much like Cartier Bresson and Mary Ellen Mark's iconic works. These glimpses reveal the humor and pathos deep within each of us, with an immediacy that oftentimes releases unchecked laughter.

Debra Pearlman is based in Brooklyn. This is the artist's first solo exhibition with ODETTA, having premiered her print Carousel at ODETTA's Harlem space's inaugural exhibition, Turner's Patent Yellow.

Pearlman's work is included in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The Walker Art Center, New York Public Library, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Museum Sztuki and Smith College Museum among others.

She is the recipient of The Meredith S. Moody Residency at Yaddo, The Peter S. Reed Foundation, a Special Editions and an Individual Artist Grant from the Lower East Side Print Shop, and the Foundation for Contemporary Art.

Her work has been shown nationally and internationally including SLAG Gallery, Sue Scott, Gallery, Exit Art, The international Print Center, The Biennial in Lodz, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and The Chicago Renaissance Society.

Pearlman received an M.F.A. from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a B.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts.

A Kind of Language has been extended through Friday, February 26.