Page Bond Gallery is pleased to present Isa Gagarin, West. The perceptual experience of color and its capacity to be embodied in a variety of materials is central to Gagarin’s interests and to the development of her work. These new drawings combine charcoal, pigment, and collage to depict botanical imagery. Silhouettes of plants are rendered softly in grey charcoal, disrupted with colored collage elements that feel like slivers of reflective light piercing through a forest. Gagarin works on these multiple collages simultaneously, using scraps of torn paper to freely explore color relationships in varied compositions.

Trained as a painter, Gagarin works both on paper and with site specific installation. In her installation work, color’s relativity becomes exponential in terms of the scale, lighting and the overall feel of a space. The works in West are individual drawings shown in multiples, as grids, triptychs, and diptychs. The edges of each drawing and the colored collage elements converse and relate with one another, forming a sense of larger space.

Gagarin describes: “One aspect of my work that has surprised me is that there are often formal elements within my installations that resonate with my origins as a Pacific Islander. I was born on Guam and raised mostly in Hawai’i, and I come from a Chamorro maternal lineage. My work holds a certain reverence for beauty and quietude, which originates from my experiences as a surfer and my intuitive understanding of waves and tidal movements.” The drawings in West invite us to become aware of the unique ways in which we experience color, light and space.