Rachael Gorchov: Making Strange
September 12 – October 19, 2014
Opening Reception: Friday, September 12, 7pm-10pm

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TSA NY is pleased to present Making Strange, an exhibition of recent work by Rachael Gorchov.

The entry point to this work is the landscape of suburban, semi-public spaces: lawns, ponds, skies and flora, planned and invasive, that surround office and industrial complexes. Gorchov paints these elements with varying degrees of specificity, allowing image to collide, dissolve into and be convoluted by painterly gestural abstraction. The paint inhabits geometric and organic three-dimensional forms that hang on the wall, inviting gravity to a wrestling match with balance. The forms work in concert to frame and obscure, defamiliarizing omnipresent, ordinary environments.

After drawing and photographing onsite at commercial parks both inhabited and abandoned, Gorchov constructs conglomerated landscapes in her studio. Her aim is to highlight that which is hidden in plain view: the idiosyncratic, romantic, picturesque, calming, ominous, daydreamy, imaginary and secret. If you choose to spend time with these paintings, they will ask you to explore by walking around, ducking, tilting your head, craning your neck. The structures may be reminiscent of other things, the paint may accentuate or distract from the form for a disorienting experience, thus “making strange” – a translation of the term, coined by Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky, ostranenie: an artistic device to “impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.” By slowing the act of perception, the familiar is made new and unusual.

Rachael Gorchov received her BFA from Tyler School of Art and her MFA from Hunter College. She has participated in exhibitions at Harbor Gallery in Ridgewood, Queens; Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Philadelphia; The University of Massachusetts in Amherst; The Billboard Art Project; The English Folk Dance and Song Society in London; Galeria Arsenał in Białystok, Poland and has been featured on Gorky’s Granddaughter. Originally from Philadelphia, Gorchov lives and works in New York City.