571 Projects is pleased to announce Rain Seen From a Cave, an exhibition of 10 new and recent mixed media and collage works on paper by Sally Gil. Trained as a painter, Gil has established her visual vocabulary as an accomplished teller of nonlinear stories, layering appropriated imagery and painted gestures to create mesmerizing technicolor utopias. Poetic stories slowly unravel through visual linkages. Juxtaposing references to the natural world with images from the man made world - architecture, artifacts, comic books - her works fizz with the energy of things and places. This is her fourth show with the gallery. A reception and artist talk will take place on Friday, October 16th, 5 - 7p at the gallery.
"I make my work to figure things out […] to celebrate and mourn the world," Gil states. Carefully built, her works encourage the viewer to journey into fantastical worlds, marked by the layering and passing of time and memory. Dreamlike, each work has its own interior logic: every gesture is considered, every juxtaposition is intentional. In Rain Seen From a Cave (2024, mixed media and collage on paper, 22 x 30 in.) lush green vegetation tangles down over an opening onto the blue beyond, while in the foreground a pool reflects the sky. Scale and proportion distort, a large cobweb catches our eye and a tiny appropriated image of an ornate palace hides upside down in the pool, its inverted roofline mirroring the shape of the vegetation above it. The title itself is richly evocative: it carries a humid, mineral quality, and even the specific soundscape of the dripping of water inside the cave and beyond it.
At the heart of Gil's work is a kind of specificity, a kind of truth. Borrowing freely from all cultures, an omnivorous curiosity drives her; her profound interest in artifacts from our shared human existence and the inherent beauty of the natural world structure her artistic enquiry. Painted gestures create constellations, webs, and energy fields, in the white lines in the cosmically inspired Spill (2023, collage, paper mâché and paint on paper, 51 x 42 in.), or in the jagged electricity of The Unicorn and the Bluebird (2025, mixed media collage and paint on paper, 13 x 10.5 in.): the interconnectedness of things is revealed, celebrated, and scaffolds these possible universes. Just as Gil's works are created with slow deliberation, sometimes over years, so too, do they ask us pause, to take time and notice the many kinds of beauty that surround us.
Born and raised in Bennington, Vermont, Sally Gil received her Bachelor of Arts from the University of California San Diego and her Master of Fine Arts from Hunter College, CUNY. She has shown at Bennington Museum, Vermont; White Columns, New York; The Helen Day Art Center, Stowe, VT; Geary Contemporary, New York; 571 Projects, New York and Vermont; The University of North Carolina, Charlotte, NC; and the Dean Bergen Gallery, Brooklyn, NY. She has also been featured in group shows at The Fleming Museum, in Burlington, VT; Bennington Museum, Bennington, Vermont; The Brooklyn Museum; The Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn; and White Columns, NYC, among other venues. In 2013, Gil was selected as a Fellow at ApexArt and traveled to São Paolo, Brazil for one month. She was chosen as a visiting artist at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte in 2010 and at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville in 2001. Her work was part of the US State Department's Arts in Embassies program and was displayed in the American Embassy in Brazzaville, Congo from 2014 to 2016. In 2018, she was awarded a New York City MTA public art commission for the Avenue U station on the N line, Brooklyn. For this commission, she created and oversaw the fabrication of fourteen 4 x 9 feet mosaic niches installed at Avenue U on the N line in Brooklyn, New York. In 2020, an image from her subway installation was chosen for the "Poetry in Motion" project featured throughout the New York City subway system. Gil is based in Brooklyn, New York.
