Debra Bermingham
September 5 - October 5, 2002

Debra Bermingham's fifth solo exhibition in New York City shows the artist continuing to explore and expand upon a private and unique universe. 'Evoking an atomosphere of stillness, suspended time and mystery, Debra Bermingham's paintings may be viewed literally as interiors and landscapes, but they may also be read metaphorically as allegories of life, death and the passage of time,' Robert M. Murdock observes in the catalogue essay.

An important turning point for Bermingham occurred after she was awarded a Ballinglen Arts Foundation Fellowship in 2000. The Fellowship gaver her the opportunity to live and work for a period of time in an isolated cottage in setting, landscape and climate enabled her to produce new work with a fresh eye and to reevaluate her previous work.

These recent paintings develop and bring into sharper focus a number of thematic and formal concerns that have absorbed Bermingham over the years. They are full of seeming contradictions: antique toys that assume eerily human presences; vast interiours both empty and not empty; windows filled with a diffused light that never quite seems to admit the outside world; shadowy figures that appear less real than the masks they often wear.

Bermingham has also drawn much inspiration over the years from the landscape of the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, where she has lived since the early 1980s. As she documents the changing landscape through paintings suffused with seasonal color and light, she also shows the evidence of civilization's presence and intrusion. Bermingham has explained, 'I see my landscape paintings as an effort to preserve something. As the landscape changes... the paintings become a keepsake, like a treasured shell or butterfly put away in a cigar box.'

The exhibition is accompanied by a color catalogue with an essay by Robert M. Murdock.