ANN PIBAL: MIRAGE /
Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton, NY
May 06 – May 29, 2024

Halsey McKay presents Mirage, Ann Pibal’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Pibal’s new series of near-monochrome paintings evoke an evolving, fading depiction of glowing light throughout the gallery space. Pibal’s paintings capitalize on the varying visual speeds of high, mid, or lo-chroma color, dynamic elaborations of brushstroke, and passages of matte and glossy swaths of pigment. Her use of metallic and iridescent paints add a sensual element which directly interacts with the room, reflecting both the ambient light and the movement of viewers across the evolving color across the panels. 

A central motif of these works is a rectangle, which in its proportion echoes the format of the paintings overall. Diagrammatic representations of book pages or volumes extend the reference to time – allowing an apparently neutral shape to evoke not just the phenomenon of fleeting, transitory, light, but the mutability of understanding. Shifting, wavering, appearances of images are held in the mind of the viewer, making thepaintings illusory, while undeniably abstract. They depict a broken symmetry between perception and reality— that which is seen in a haze, in a dream, or otherwise in the imagination.