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Title: Side Angle Tide: Recent Works by Eleanor Conover, November 17 - December 15 2022
Description: Swarthmore, PA, List Gallery, Swarthmore College, 2022. Softcover. Small Quarto. Softcover. Illustrated wraps. 35 pages. The List Gallery, Swarthmore College is pleased to present Side Angle Tide, an exhibition of recent works by Eleanor Conover. The exhibition will take place November 17 – December 15, 2022. Conover will be honored as the Donald J. Gordon Visiting Artist and lecture about her work on Thursday, November 17 at 4:30 PM in the Lang Performing Arts Center Cinema. The List Gallery reception will follow, 5:30 – 7:00 PM. An exhibition catalog with an essay by Eleanor Heartney will accompany the exhibition. List Gallery hours are Tuesdays through Sundays, Noon – 5:00 PM. Admission to the gallery and all events are free and open to the public. Conover takes inspiration from varied interests, including geology, ecology, poetry, and geometry, and her creative process is equally interdisciplinary. The artist builds irregular polygonal canvases that, from a distance, suggest the forms of large, eccentrically shaped shields, windows, or anatomic forms. Viewing them more closely, Conover's imagery and materials may evoke varied associations, including nocturnal landscapes, geometric studies, or cabinets of wonder. Developing her compositions in concert with the eccentric shape of each canvas, Conover marshals a wide array of painting media, including both natural and artificial dyes, bleach, acrylic, oil, and graphite. In many canvases, compelling images, such as a large shell set on a window sash or a plumb line hanging in front of a tilted grid, offer entry points into complex and mysterious worlds. She masterfully integrates such illusionistic forms with more abstracted passages of painting, bold fields of color and pattern, apertures, and collage materials, such as stone fragments, that ground her works in the "real" world. Conover's compositions cannot be taken in all at once, but instead invite exploration. Like the poems of Emily Dickinson, works such as Tender Carpenter, High Tide offer resonant images, dramatic contrasts, and poignant elisions that invite viewers to draw their own conclusions. The fact that the edges of each canvas are beveled at a 45 degree angle, not perpendicular to the picture plane, accentuates the dynamism of each work. Whereas many traditional painters view structural supports (and even the perimeter of their canvases) as secondary to their imagery, Conover emphasizes both exterior and interior edges, harmonizes seemingly contradictory elements, and disrupts conventions of perspective and symmetry. If her lines, angles, and grids imply an underlying geometric theorem, it is one that embraces multiplicity, transition, and entropy as well as order. VG.

Keywords: American Artists ; Conover, Eleanor ; ;


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