Sharon Feder, Station No. 7
April 11 - May 16, 2015 at George Billis Gallery, Culver City
by Simone Kussatz
Denver-born artist Sharon Feder has the ability to metamorphose the banal into the extraordinary. The objects in her paintings give the impression to be more than, say, rail tracks, telephone poles, power lines or buildings to provide shelter or work space. They are like skeletons, providing evidence of the core structure of the energy of the people who designed and relied on them. Feder regards all of this at something of a distance, as objects representing our cultural heritage and civilization. Her paintings, mostly created by applying color on top of a red and brown-toned underpainting via brush and palette knife, also depict nature’s interaction with the made environment, such as the sun reflecting off buildings, causing different atmospheres, in contrast with how human beings create energies through our pure being, or what Hegel refers to as “Dasein.” One can’t miss Norman Lundin’s influence, under whom Feder studied at University of Washington in Seattle, on her exploration of light and shadows and the search for resulting geometric forms.