The Ladies of Shalott
Paintings by Eleanor Moreton
December 4 – January 5, 2011
Opening: December 10, 6-9pm
The Jack Hanley Gallery is pleased to present “The Ladies of Shalott,” a solo exhibition of paintings by Eleanor Moreton. Painting with a savior faire tempered by the hand of introspection, Eleanor Moreton lays the pictorial and figural tradition bare in a haze of its own mythology. Bleak saturation and reverent hues consume the canvas. Layered strokes cut back on themselves allowing the painter’s past to seep through her final coat of oil. Unlike John William Waterhouse’s narrative depiction of the Arthurian legend, Moreton’s “Ladies of Shalott” is the moment of the turn of the head, of the cracked mirror. In her revision, an ever-festering malady is forged.
Half sick of shadows, as legend has it, high up in her prison tower, the Lady of Shalott is cursed to experience the world through the mirror placed before her. No longer able to withstand such a fate, the lady turns to see what has forever existed behind her--the mirror cracks. With a blurred vision, somewhere between the realm of shadows and the realm of flesh, the lady takes three paces through the room and it is in this fleeting moment before inevitable demise that Moreton’s work lingers. She paints monochromatic rooms of green plagued to slip away, regal figures of indiscernible gender, and gaunt landscapes dedicated to Austrian painter Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller. Historical events, fables, memories, literature and found images collapse in on themselves and become symptoms of a faceless malady that when viewing Moreton’s “Ladies of Shalott” we too are stricken by.
Eleanor Moreton’s work has been shown in spaces throughout the United Kingdom including Ceri Hand Gallery, Monika Bobinska Gallery, Bearspace, and Transition Gallery. She received her Masters in Painting from the Chelsea College of Art and her Masters in Art History and Theory from the University of Central England. This is Eleanor Moreton’s first solo exhibition in the United States.