ROSALIND TALLMADGE

AETHER

OPENING FRIDAY, 03.15.24 | 6 – 9PM

ON VIEW UNTIL 05.04.24

Thine earthly rainbows stretch'd across the sweep

Of the aethereal waterfall, whose veil

Robes some unsculptur'd image – Percy Bysshe Shelley

CARVALHO PARK announces the opening of newly represented, New York-based artist Rosalind Tallmadge’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, Aether. Demonstrating Tallmadge’s notable practice with natural materials, Aether is an apotheosis of eight elemental works, including a site-specific installation, continuously transformed through their relationship with light and shadow, space and time. Forged into a new framework, their quintessence represents an elevated ascent of her craft. Tallmadge’s creative inspiration and phenomenology has long been guided by the inquiry of substances and their make. Distilling her chosen mediums to their essence, her work has persistently maintained an otherworldly quality.

Issuing transformation through physical, chemical, and elemental means, Aether requires the viewer’s presence to wholly take shape. Originally derived from the Greek Αιθηρ, god of the heavenly atmospheres, æther assimilated into the roster of medieval alchemical traditions, becoming the fifth element beyond earth, fire, water, and air – the stuff of “luminiferous proliferation,” of the invisible holding space. This perception of existing within a vaporous aerie is present throughout the exhibition. Tallmadge’s talent is extracting these discarnate concepts and assembling them into corporeality – Aether is sensed as the space between breaths. 

Established through a palette of delicate materials, the ephemeral quality of each piece reflects the liminal, primordial purity of their form. This intricate distillation is apparent in the three related bodies of work Tallmadge has produced – a series of selenite crystal and glass, one of mirrored mica, and a suspended installation of Japanese organza. Light, air, and time itself become ingredients of the experience; as the sunlight drifts across walls, clouds pass overhead, temperatures rise and fall, components oxidize and patina, settling and resettling, new works are born. This metaphysical transmutation reframes physical objects into moments, like the slip of moonlight over a glittering lake.

Tallmadge’s numinous selenite crystal works, embodied as Intimate Stranger (Ghost), The salt of your skin, and Waning Light waft across the walls. Supported on backbones of glass, faint slices of selenite become the clouded surface of deeper recollections one can only vaguely recall – imprints of something once tangible but no longer there. Carefully arranged, each cloven crystal is set, perfectly balanced, in its frame. Its delicacy is juxtaposed against the large, weighty stone it originated from, as well as its placement upon the equally fragile, but heavier, glass rib. The “coagulated light” of the spliced selenite becomes a speculum of impermanence, a diffused glow sharpening and softening through the day, a memory fading into the background.

In burnished contrast to the pearly evanescence of the selenite works, Tallmadge’s mirrored mica paintings seem to come from the core of the earth. Cultivated from a longtime practice of utilizing reflective materials in her work, Tallmadge began expanding her research into the clandestine techniques of mirrored mediums. Sonambulo I and II and Ripple are hand-fabricated through pre-industrial means, the process resulting in a dimly golden, enigmatic impression for those peering into its depths – much like the alchemical aurum of lore. Adopting an earthly mineral and enhancing its inherent qualities to not only shine, but also to lure light into its depths, becomes a parable for the transfiguration of the physical into the transcendent. What shadows do we acknowledge and set free after viewing through a glass, darkly? What thresholds do we perceive when we acquiesce to the light existent in the deep? By glimpsing into the oblique, shaded interior of the other, we learn about our own projections of the self. Sheaths on diaphanous silk, which, when stretched, provides taut strength, these works embody the compromise between the weight of the world and the pith of the peripheral that sustains it.

Installed above the prismatic panels of daylight and dark stars is the ultimate permutation of light, a large-scale, site-specific installation composed of extra-fine Japanese organza, billowing under the aperture of the gallery. Embodying the membranous traits of æther itself, shimmering and coalescing light through its warm, pink tones, the fabric radiates with the energetic flush of skin. Scales of incandescent mica increasingly dissipate the organza underneath, once again heaven and earth intertwining – a veiled portal to the transcendent mysteries containing the earthly realm. The viewer is pulled into its dreamy wake, provoked to consider the intricate architecture of the boundless above and below. As participants in relationship with the space, each physical step becomes a mystical passage, our own molecules and atoms moving to gaze upon dreamy mirrors and shrouded forms. 

The beauty and craft behind Aether are a culmination of Tallmadge’s impeccable execution, and her ability to transform material into the celestial. Her meditations on transcendental processes have manifested into work that exquisitely captures the momentary flash of the sublime when we ascend to the outer realms of consciousness. Aether is an invocation of the arcane, of the unbearable lightness we inhabit when we hold both the light and the dark abyss in ourselves. And the recognition that we, too, can become the container of unobscured brilliance.

Exhibition essay by independent curator J. Simmz.

Rosalind Tallmadge (b. 1987, Cincinnati, Ohio) is a multi-media artist currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Tallmadge holds a BFA from Indiana University, Bloomington, 2010, and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, 2015. Her work has been acquired by international public and private collections and has been exhibited widely in New York, Miami, Detroit, Chicago, and Seoul, including with CARVALHO PARK (New York); David Klein Gallery (Detroit); the Louise Nevelson Chapel (New York); and Kiche Gallery (Seoul, forthcoming). Tallmadge was featured in the 2021 exhibition, With Eyes Opened: Cranbrook Academy of Art since 1932, Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. In 2023, Opus One commissioned an installation of five site-specific works, titled Les Elements, for the entry rotunda and Opus One’s permanent collection in the Napa Valley. Tallmadge is represented by CARVALHO PARK, New York, and David Klein, Detroit.