In Gallery 2, Zach Feuer Gallery is pleased to present Perceptible by Comparison, an exhibition of paintings, with accompanying titles, and a photograph by Alisha Kerlin.

Kerlin’s paintings are defined by their painterly, luminous, atmospheric grounds built from layers of color on which a single subject is rendered. The objects lean towards solitude – fallen trees, solitaire games, measuring tapes, circling vultures and dangling carrots – but the painterly periphery and titles point to the edge of a wider issue. The paintings enact, and are made sensitive to, assumed relationships between painter, painting and viewer through use of titles such as Two Unequal Players, With one’s back to or up against the wall and In the distance she could see the clear blue sea. Subject matter may be repeated from painting to painting but adjustments, including changes made to account for point of view and the supposed vanishing point, lead to works that embody an autonomous reading independent of the depicted objects. A measuring tape hovers above a watery situation in Riding into the Sunset, acting as a standard unit of comparison between the ground and the viewer’s perceived distance from there (perhaps the horizon) to here. A carrot lure dangles from a stick in She hovered anxiously in the background, and a tree is frozen mid-fall in This Side Of, asking the philosophical question: can something exist without being perceived? The show title is inspired by a portrait of a pet shop lizard back-grounded by a grouping of the world’s largest dinosaurs, proposing that one’s perception is influenced by their comparative position.

Alisha Kerlin, born in 1981, received her MFA from Bard College and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.