Tribeca
Melanie Daniel
Through Feb. 14. Asya Geisberg Gallery, 4.5 Cortlandt Alley between White Street and Franklin Street; 212-675-7525, asyageisberggallery.com.
In “Here a Dead Leaf Fell,” the Canadian artist Melanie Daniel invents haunting landscapes teetering between dream and hallucination. Using colors that stand out on their own, she depicts a world that is at once recognizable and strange, like when a familiar map becomes scrambled.
Daniel, who has art degrees from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, was born 1972 in British Columbia, where she lives and works. Over her career, she has developed a palette that, mixed with her otherworldly subjects and landscapes, evokes a sense of the surreal.
In “The Moon’s Emissary,” a woman in a cloak and a hat walks her dog under blue moonlight. Except that the dog is not a dog. It is a wolf: In other paintings it recurs, and even howls at the moon in “Scales, Soil, and Bone-Creaks (2).”
The woman with the hat recurs too, in multiple paintings, often with animals (like a bird in “Starfisher”), sailing across lakes and shadows, hiding among foliage. This is how Daniel builds layer upon layer, adding meaning across the show.
The vibrant, voluminous patterns in Daniel’s paintings, coupled with earthly elements like mountains, rivers, forests and the moon, make for a rich mythic universe where everything is in a state of constant flux. They invite us to be aware that not only humans are sentient.
YINKA ELUJOBA