Sarah Jacobs’ current exhibition, “Magical Realism,” on display at the Gettysburg Majestic Theater Gallery, is a colorful, exuberant, challenging, and sometimes disorienting exploration of how separate scenes and images can become parts of a larger whole.
Jacobs, an internationally-known Gettysburg-based artist, works in oil and mixed media, combining traditional painting with digital collage, photography and images printed on fabric or canvas. The resulting pieces contain turbulent skies, enlarged natural and human-made forms, replications of images across works, and fractured perspectives.
From across the room, the works command attention through their scale and intense colors: rich reds and violets, bright yellows and sweeping blues. Up close, the works reveal the diverse processes Jacobs uses to create their apparent disorder.
In “Portrait of the Viewer as a Storm,” a large oil painting on canvas, clouds appear to billow, churn and collapse into one another, while pale blue, pink and yellow light emerges from darker masses of green, gray and black.
The work can be read simply as an atmospheric landscape, but its title turns the weather inward. The storm becomes a portrait of the viewer’s consciousness or emotional life.
Other pieces are more materially complex. Jacobs sometimes begins with a painting, photographs it, prints the resulting image onto fabric, arranges the fabric into folds and photographs it again. She then incorporates those altered images into a new work. The original painting passes through several transformations before returning to the canvas.
“Reunion” combines oil with a digital collage made from photographs of an earlier painting and printed on cotton canvas. Its sweeping bands of red, violet, yellow and blue resemble enormous flower petals, crumpled cloth and geological formations at the same time.
Sections of the image appear to fold over or push through others, making it difficult to determine what is in the foreground and what lies behind it. That uncertainty is central to the work’s appeal.
Another composition, “Reception,” extends actual fabric beyond the rectangular edge of the canvas. The material spills onto the gallery wall, disrupting the boundary between the artwork and the space surrounding it.
At times, the abundance of patterns, colors and competing visual effects threatens to overwhelm the quieter ideas beneath them. Jacobs is a maximalist, however, and the excess is intentional. She asks whether people exist as isolated individuals, as integral parts of a collective whole, or somehow as both simultaneously.
Jacobs cites quantum theory as an inspiration, particularly the possibility that multiple understandings of reality could be valid at the same time. That influence appears in images containing several versions of a sky or multiple layers of space within a single composition.
The exhibition remains on display through Nov. 4. Additional work and the artist’s bio can be viewed on Jacobs’ website.
Featured image caption: “Reception”
