Galleri Urbane is pleased to present, North Texas artist Abby Sherrill for her first solo exhibition with GUM+D, Modes of Moving Air, continuing the examination of the banality of everyday objects. This time she focuses on perception of reality through pattern, texture, and humor using digital, physical, and textual materials as the medium.
Taking cues from philosophers Michel Foucault and Martin Heidegger, Sherrill analyzes the philosophical and psychological spaces between words and images. Echoing Foucault’s dissection of the relationship between image/object and text/meaning, Sherrill creates a body of work that illustrates these relationships. She utilizes elements like patterned text and scanned representations of objects that act as air, easily unnoticeable to the uninformed viewer.
With this work, Abby Sherrill gives new meaning to the mundane. She celebrates functional objects by stripping them of their function in favor of decontextualization and decoration. She visualizes the chaotic task of constantly defining and re-defining ones own reality by layering patterns and displaying larger-than-life representations of objects, instead of the actual objects themselves. Not unaware of the enormous and overwhelming nature of said task, Sherrill also offers the viewer respite through her humorous and playful juxtaposition of everyday found objects.
Working through her own sense of reality, Sherrill blends elements of sculpture, painting, and photography in a way that allows the viewer to re-imagine their own perception of objects and space. She gives the mundane the possibility to be exotic. Through the seamless use of digital and physical imagery, Sherrill gives a depth to the lines produced by her hand, and it’s not always a literal line.
Abby Sherrill is a visual artist living and working in Denton, Texas. She has been included in group exhibitions at Galleri Urbane (Dallas), 500X Gallery (Dallas), and Rudolph Blume Fine Art (Houston). She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, and she recently completed a residency at Vermont Studio Center. Sherrill holds an MFA in Fibers from the University of North Texas, where she currently works as an Art Technician.