Sight lines is an exhibition of photographs and video works by the Brooklyn-based artist Meighan Gale is a survey of work executed in 2005 – 2006.

In this exhibition Gale continues to explore techniques that catalog movement and the body’s many ranges. The subject of her photographs is the split second between tension and relaxation, suspension and release, when all action is controlled. Rather than freeze motion, the photographs preserve moments of equilibrium that immediately afterward become a memory, one moment in the everyday negotiation of play and work, childhood and maturity, past and future. The work is an ongoing attempt to distill a gestural alphabet from the vocabulary of daily movement; including family life and the navigation of domestic space, landscape and exercise, and the improvisational gestures of expression and communication. These positions, angles, and rest points are embedded in what is necessarily unique to each of us – a personal language of the body – with all its reflexes, mannerisms, tics, and habits.

In Sight Lines, the captured gestures happen on a stage before a landscape. In the large scale work, a layer of line is added by Gale’s children who have drawn on the glass through which the image is shot. In the small scale work, another layer of line is added by sewing on the surface of the image. These lines allude to trajectories of movement, energy, and space. The image becomes a composite of landscape, figure, and line where the perspective is skewed, position is marked and elaborated on, and the surface is disrupted. All of the traditional elements of image making are present layered across time not constructed simultaneously. Together these images endeavor to illustrate our place in the landscape, the family, and in our imagination.