JANE CORRIGAN

SHADOW SCRIPT

July 19 - August 5, 2019

Opening reception, Friday, July 19, 6 - 9 pm

Gaa Gallery Provincetown

Gaa Gallery is delighted to present a solo exhibition with New York-based painter Jane Corrigan. The exhibition will be on view July 19 through August 5, 2019, at the gallery’s Provincetown location, 494 Commercial Street, Provincetown, MA. An opening reception with the artist will be held on Friday, July 19, from 6 to 9 pm.

“And if he left off dreaming about you…”
--Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

What are we doing? Passing notes to each other, secretly of course, so they’re not confiscated. Private worlds escape public exposure. Private worlds are celebrated and they burn brightly like one thousand suns. Passing notes in a one-room schoolhouse.  Passing notes under the clouds. Passing notes from time zone to time zone; epoch to epoch; from planet to planet.

The girls are bold and roughly drawn, like the heroines in a Willa Cather novel. They are from a place where wind blows heavily and strongly. They might be starring in a Neil Young song when they grow up. They might be Joni Mitchell’s little sister. Doo-wop and bee-bop, and pop ballads play from their 1950s radios. They will soon be adults. Now they pass notes and wait for the rain to stop so they can go out and catch fireflies and look for animal bones. One of the girls dreams of a singular horse, a statue come to life in the desert of her imagination. Speed was introduced to humans when horses were domesticated. Do we know what to do with all this quickness?

But what is contained in these notes? Song lyrics. Gossip. Feelings expressed simply, feelings expressed with no limits. Coded language. A society of teenagers was formed and made almighty by note-passing. Someone, somewhere, in pre-modern Europe was passing a note. In a tree in Greece. Through a dreamtime awakening in Australia. In a medieval village in Southern France. But back to the girls. They do not have a place. They only have time.

What else to note? The absence of authority figures. No parents, men, or boys. But it’s not all fun and games. There is an absence of purity. There is a thick feeling of reality. The chalky blues skies, the rust-colored sweaters, the twirling folds of heavy fabric. The grimy smudge of life, literalized in quickened oil paint storyboards. The tiny horse statue. The orange juice glass. The passing glimpse of a palm tree in a coloring book about a white horse. The passing of a note to your best friend with the secret that will let her know all she needs to know in this world.

-Nora Griffin

Jane Corrigan (b. 1980, Quebec, Canada) lives in Brooklyn. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at White Columns, New York; Kerry Schuss, New York; Retrospective, Hudson, NY; Feuer/Mesler, New York; Erin Stump Projects, Toronto; and at Marinaro, New York. Group shows include those at Rental Gallery, East Hampton, NY; Invisible Exports, New York; Insect Gallery, Los Angeles; Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran, Montreal; Carbon 12, Dubai; Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York; Sikkema Jenkins, New York; Wilkinson Gallery, London; Karma, New York; Feuer/Mesler, New York; Oakville Galleries, Canada; among others. She was a recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award in 2013, has been granted residencies at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program in Brooklyn, New York. Corrigan is represented by Marinaro, New York and Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran, Montreal.