Tiffany Pollack produces work that departs from the familiar in order to investigate the universal. Pollack uses images culled and collected from her daily life and family history for her canvases, ceramic sculptures, and drawings. She forces examinations of her own life together with objective formal investigations between media in a synergistic manner where in her end products all the questions posed seem somehow deeper, broader, and more profound due to their interconnectedness with often unassociated lines of thought.

Pollack wants to understand the idea of the vessel as being analogous to the person, or body. What does an individual’s appearance reveal about their contents, their thoughts and ideas. Vessels contain something, or nothing, and often their exteriors offer no hints about the contents. In a clever twist on this idea Pollack uses actual ceramic vessels to paint figurative images of friends, family, pets, etc on. She also produces paintings and drawings of similar subject matter. She then produces paintings of the ceramics, and ceramics of the paintings. The levels of immediacy or remove accumulate as Pollack tries to delve into what it means to paint on ceramics and how constructing the surface of an oil painting can be equated to glazing a piece of ceramic.

That the imagery is of such personal relevance for the artists adds a complicated undercurrent to the question of how to accurately capture an image. Her paintings, through passages of painterly flurries, drips, abstractions, and the like, acknowledge that they are paintings; that they are perhaps not the truest way to depict things as we see or remember…but then what would be? Pollack captures passing moments that somehow stuck, that were memorable for her but for any number of reasons might have been lost to a passerby. She captures these moments, whose importance to her she is not always entirely sure of, in her art, but questions the accuracy of both memory and representation simultaneously.

As Pollack herself succinctly put it, “the work is about accepting images and elements of life and realizing that they are fragile, breakable, temporary.” Pollack creates art that rests in this uneasy state, but celebrates the beauty of an imperfect system.

This will be Tiffany Pollack’s first solo exhibition at Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, Inc.