New Work by Gay Outlaw
August 30 - October 12, 2003

Gallery Talk by Gay Outlaw
Friday, August 29, 5 pm
In the Museum

Opening Reception
Friday, August 29, 5:30–7:30 pm
In the Museum

Gay Outlaw has pursued her interest in light and the tricks optics play on our perception of volume through explorations of the properties of various materials. For example, a bundle of cardboard mailing tubes with their ends cut diagonally and their interiors painted yellow change radically in their illusion of volume as one walks around it. Working with modular units, Outlaw has achieved expanses of light-transforming images. Clear cast glass units, assembled in a grid pattern, catch the light, undulating in wave formations. Moving to familiar, ephemeral food materials, she has added the dimension of time: we can see the work change in the environment.

Following her graduation in 1981 from the University of Virginia, with a major in French, Outlaw studied at the École de Cuisine La Varenne in Paris. She returned to the United States and took up photography. Creating objects to photograph led her to focus on the object itself and a body of sculptural pieces has resulted in the past ten years. Currently residing in San Francisco, she has exhibited widely for more than a decade on the West Coast, as well as in group and solo shows elsewhere.

Outlaw’s training as a chef gave her an understanding of the properties of food products, which she has exploited in her sculpture. Two years ago, she made a large floor piece, a grid of cast caramel blocks resting on metal springs, for exhibition at COPIA in Napa, California. The piece exploited the transparency and crisp edges yet potential liquidity and softness of the blocks.

Assisted by students in the McIntire Department of Art, Outlaw will create a site-specific piece, composed of food products, for her U.Va. Art Museum exhibition, which is sponsored by the University of Virginia Arts Enhancement Fund and the Artist Program of the McIntire Department of Art.