The installation, Siren Songs, brings together a 65 foot mural painted on canvas, across which are hung composite portrait paintings. Transparent, double-sided freestanding paintings on mesh, which reinterpret layered digital compositions assembled in Photoshop, are arranged throughout the space. As with architectural windows, you see through them and as such, they are perpetually modified by one’s position in relation to them. Interruptions wherein images alternately reveal and conceal one another, suggest a non-linear visual narrative, both in the individual paintings and collectively throughout the installation, as the mural, portraits and transparent paintings interact. Like the overlapping and nested windows on my computer screen, the installation as a whole encourages many internal relationships and correspondences.

The imagery throughout the installation depicts women artists who I admire. Sourced originally from found photographs of artists in their studios, I make line drawings that are later reinterpreted, collaged, fragmented and repurposed into source material for future artworks. The mural in Siren Songs is derived from silkscreen prints based on these line drawings, while the portraits hung across the mural are painted from digital compositions made from gouache paintings. The free-standing scrim paintings installed before the mural are a free-for-all, sampling imagery from previous drawings and paintings which have been enlarged, fragmented, projected, rephotographed and layered, as well as images from my studio, such as drips of paint on the floor and accidental compositions on the palette.

Kerri Scharlin

Kerri Scharlin