Puzzler

February at Bandon Library Art Gallery: "Between Stillness and Motion" February 1st - 29th 2016

Portland artist Jill Falk's beautiful and puzzling paintings and photographs derive from many sources of inspiration, but all are concerned with the construction and deconstruction of images, and the layers of meaning concealed in the familiar. Figures emerge from shadow or can be discerned within mosaics of brilliant color; symbols hint at codes to be broken by the viewer, and possible relationships between characters in different paintings. A deceptively simple painting of a horse also references its infrastructure; TS Eliot's “skull beneath the skin.” Some paintings begin as frames from movies or TV shows, but appear here as new scenes from a world where rain and mist drain color away, and night has fallen. What do these images mean? They suggest that, if even the most ordinary scene from a well-known television series can hold secrets to be discovered, so can the most prosaic moment from real life. A photograph can both disguise and reveal its subject. Life is rich with the hidden and obscured; nothing is what it seems.