By deploying lightweight, synthetic materials in site-responsive installations and constructed drawings, Gelah Penn foregrounds internal conceptual and formal dualities: substance and immateriality, cohesion and fragmentation, balance and vertigo, banality and bling. Through cutting, layering, tearing, stapling, and stretching plastic garbage bags, Mylar, optical plastics, and mosquito netting, she examines the nature of visual ambiguity. The resulting abstractions evoke narratives ranging from the theatrical to the forensic.
Penn has exhibited widely. Her work is in the collections of the Weatherspoon Art Museum (Greensboro, NC), Columbus Museum (Columbus, GA), Brooklyn Museum Library (Brooklyn, NY) and Cleveland Institute of Art/Gund Library (Cleveland, OH). Reviews have been published in Art in America, The New York Times, artcritial.com, The Brooklyn Rail, and a feature in Sculpture Magazine. Penn has received a Tree of Life Individual Artist Grant and a fellowship from the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation.
Gelah Penn
Studios
Cheney
Gelah Penn worked in the Cheney studio.
Cheney Studio was given to MacDowell by Mrs. Benjamin P. Cheney and Mrs. Karl Kauffman. Like Barnard Studio, Cheney is a low, broadly massed bungalow. Sited on a steep westward slope, its porches are supported on wooden posts and fieldstone with lattices. Although it still retains its appealing character, the original design of the shingled building…