18" x 24" Mixed media: photographs, acrylic and metallic pigment on premiere wood panel, with maple floating frame.
Fire withheld the figure. Ice returns it and the return is the point.
Its companion reduced Eom Jum and his creature to a shape seared by heat, a body recorded by everything it was not. Here Arushi Mallick is fully present: face, posture, the fall of a white gown, a green-eyed animal cradled at her waist. But presence, it turns out, is no more stable than absence. The figure is not burned away this time; it is being buried — snowed under in pass after pass of white, veiled toward the same vanishing its sibling reached by fire. Two opposite methods, one destination. The show gave the artist a hot look and a cold one, and both, worked to their conclusion, arrive at a figure you can almost no longer see.
The work carries: Calm · Poise · Heritage · Presence · Clarity.
