CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/11/2020

In 'Ellen Gallagher: Accidental Records' radical aesthetic possibilities emerge from seismic cracks in the surface of things

"Dr. Blowfin’s Black Storm" (2014) is reproduced from Accidental Records, a concise but powerful artist's book by Ellen Gallagher that doubles as the catalogue to her recent exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles, where she presented new works dealing with the history of the four-century triangular slave trade known as the Middle Passage. "Whether through her playful photomontages, or glistening veneered black paintings, or chromatic Sea Bed paintings (featured here), Ellen Gallagher provides vectors to consider the ways in which abstraction, Orientalist genre painting, and desire converge as portraits of historical, social and personal imaginaries," Adrienne Edwards writes. "Her speculative approach sieves a broad range of seemingly incommensurable references as concrete fragments that we cannot easily trace or fully comprehend, but nevertheless, must. She engages the paradoxes she sets up and upon which she depends through a mode of archaeological extraction of history and matter. In her artworks, Gallagher relies upon what she has described as a 'jitter,' a mode of becoming in which radical aesthetic possibilities emerge from seismic cracks in the surface of things; connoting unsteady movement, unreliability, impossible alignments, blind spots and opacity as a means of escape and flight."