By fusing narrative modes including poetry, film, music, and collage, she recalibrates the tensions between reality and fantasy-unsettling designations of race and nation, art and artifact, and allowing the familiar and the arcane to converge.īorn in Providence, Rhode Island, Gallagher attended Oberlin College, Ohio artist Michael Skop’s private art school Studio 70 the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (graduating in 1992 and receiving a traveling scholar award in 1993) and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine (1993). Through processes of accretion, erasure, and extraction, Ellen Gallagher has invented a densely saturated visual language in which overlapping patterns, motifs, and materials pulse with life. I start off with a limited class of signs and, like stacking in music, I chop and revisit the changes to build structure.

What is crucial to my making of a language and a cosmology of signs is the type of repetition that is central to a lot of the music I am listening to right now.

Scholar of the Arcane Arts instal