Out of the Blue

Blue represents a historical conundrum. Is it cool or warm, masculine or feminine, obscene or pure? Does it evoke sadness? Royalty? The serenity of a calm sea? Blue has run the gamut of connotations, from being considered barbaric in the ancient world to being the most popular color in America. Out of the Blue asks what the meanings we encode in the color reveal about us and our relationship to the contemporary zeitgeist. 

Jerry Kearns highlights how popular iconography expresses American belief structures in a composition juxtaposing blue acrylic with pencil portraiture. The cobalt blue in Fedele Spadafora’s portrait, meanwhile, reflects both the revolutionary enthusiasm in the air in Tunis at the height of the Arab Spring and the light of the North African skies. Also looking towards the sky, Sharon Butler’s sculptural painting demarcates an azure expanse with exacting lines, grappling with the tension between mechanical processes and the humanism inherent in handmade objects. 

Edie Nadelhaft’s biometric painting of a human iris captures deep space as viewed through the blue light of a screen, at once staring into the void and subverting the gaze of the technological void staring back. Bruno Jakob’s “invisible paintings” further explore how culture informs our field of vision, letting atmospheric phenomena illuminate otherwise imperceptible brushstrokes to challenge the true nature of appearance. Filtering the experience of driving in the rain through the somatic hues of the mind’s eye, Yanik Wagner creates a two-dimensional analog of the visible world that condenses the rapid motion of a speeding car into the stillness of a single frame. Also examining temporal themes is Hans Witschi, whose cerulean painting of a running faucet simultaneously expresses an agonizing wait and the collapse of time in modern life. Becky Yazdan integrates the passage of time into her approach to blue as well, reshaping both the color and her relationship to her past as she builds up layers of paint in phases.

Also working in layers, Vicki Sher combines geometric systems with organic structures to encapsulate her emotional response to being in nature. Meanwhile, blue takes on a sublime quality in Barbara Friedman’s work, resembling an abyssal oil spill across which her human and animal subjects must reach to connect. Fran Shalom explores non-human perspectives through abstraction, enlivening bright blue, elemental shapes into ambiguous yet relatable characters. Finally, nature envelopes the figures in Judith Simonian’s montage-like composition, the turquoise scenery expanding, contracting, and mixing with the surroundings in a push and pull between human activity and the environment. 

Out of the Blue encourages viewers to unpack their personal associations with color. Why does blue mean what it means to you?