Opening reception, Thursday September 5, 6–8pm

In Second Sight, Sarah Gamble continues to explore inner and outer worlds through her signature approach to painting, incorporating bold color choices and intricate netted patterns that move her work in new directions. Using both abstract and representational strategies, Gamble builds on her previous paintings of intricately layered dots and energy bursts that conjure a universe abundant with celestial bodies (at times forming patterns that suggest human ones) as well as more terrestrial images of dense foliage that are nonetheless otherworldly. According to Gamble, the dots can be understood as atomized matter depicting the re-organization of animate and inanimate objects into new states of being as they enter into other dimensions.

Followers of Gamble’s art will discern a noticeable shift in palette—purples and bright reds at times trade places with her trademark white constellations and dot trails. Leafy plants fluctuate from green to blue to red. Crystals and gemstones might be the central subject of a smaller painting, or be nestled and hidden amongst a painting of a larger forest scene. The unusual coloration of the plant paintings and their minute details conjure glowing mineral collections under the fluorescent light in a natural history museum display whereby the invisible is made visible. The intense colors might also evince an illuminating force projecting on the dense thicket or emanating from within. The notion of energies or other dimensions hidden or obscured—and then revealed—is threaded throughout. Paintings are related to one another whereby one might be an enlarged detail of a microcosm of another, or a rendition of the life force lying within a sister painting.

Paintings incorporating net-like dotted formations recall both Ruth Asawa’s wire sculptures, and modernist biomorphic shapes. Gamble likens these signature dots to the beads of an abacus whose calculations are more biographical divination than mathematical problem-solving: an effort to determine the best way to move through a given moment in time.

Sarah Gamble (b. 1974, lives and works in Philadelphia) has had solo exhibitions at Philadelphia venues including Fleisher/Ollman, Moore College of Art, Bambi Gallery, Pageant, and Fleisher Art Memorial. Other solo shows have taken place at Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta, GA; Lump Gallery Project Space, Raleigh, NC; and Jack the Pelican Presents, Brooklyn, NY. Gamble has been included in group exhibitions at venues such as Edward Thorp Gallery, New York, NY; RedLine Art Center, Denver, CO; Roswell Museum and Art Center, Roswell, NM; Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE; Marlin and Regina Miller Gallery, Kutztown University, Kutztown, PA; and Fjord Gallery, Philadelphia. Gamble was awarded a MacDowell fellowship in 2023, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts in 2009, and completed a yearlong residency at the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program, New Mexico in 2014. She received her MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and her BFA from the Corcoran Gallery College of Art and Design, Washington, DC.