Heather Stivison – Ebb & Flow: The Many Faces of Water

Pleiades Gallery presents Ebb & Flow: The Many Faces of Water, an unusual exhibition that combines art. music, and science. In this, Heather Stivison’s third NYC solo exhibition, she explores the intersection of environmental science and visual art in immersive paintings of the ocean. Ebb & Flow opens on September 2 at Pleiades Gallery, 547 West 27^th Street, Suite 304. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday, 12-6 p.m.

Six of the paintings on view resulted from Stivison’s multi-year, grant-funded collaboration with Noah Germolus, a an ocean chemistry scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Their collaboration led to a unique special feature of this exhibition. After Stivison interpreted his data in paint, he in turn, interpreted four of her paintings in music. The exhibition includes an on-demand sound installation of original jazz music composed and performed by Germolus.

Curator Renee Phillips writes, “Stivison ventures beyond nature’s physical boundaries into abstraction with the profusion of free-flowing biomorphic patterns and tonal ranges. In her paintings the innate attributes of water evolve into metaphors, symbolism and visual poetry.”

The exhibition features a sampling of the many ways Stivison’s oil and acrylic paintings capture the essence of water. Searching for water’s most primary qualities, she uses light, color, form, shape, line, to engender a sense of water. Stivison is fascinated by the reflections and patterns created by the coastal ocean surface. She paints variations on patterns, exploring how much she can change them and still maintain the sense that the subject is surface water. Other paintings explore chemical mysteries within specific ocean zones of exploration. A massive 110-inch quadriptych offers a sense of weightlessness and mystery that she finds in the unknown ocean depths.