Yellow Night

The Barn Project is pleased to present Yellow Night, its inaugural exhibition by Ash Ferlito and Ilse Sørensen Murdock. Ferlito and Murdock, who first met in Skowhegan, Maine, at the artist residency, share a devotion to color, light and the natural world. The two worked side-by-side in each others’ studio every Wednesday night for nearly three years, cut short only by the pandemic,  encouraging and egging each other on to dive directly toward what matters most to them, eschewing irony and covert strategies to embrace increasingly direct ways  of representing concerns for and connections to nature.

In Yellow Night their new works evoke the evening landscape and its inhabitants. Through color and mark making, each artist elicits the feelings of a summer nocturne – searching, melancholic, energetically charged, ineffable – while upending the genre through their own unusual materials and formal invention. The color Yellow can be a formal thread, a thread that pulls one into noticing more of itself and also what it is not. Yellow has a tone of new beginnings: for painters it is the first color next to white on a traditional painting palette, and is the lightest color within a refracted spectrum. New science posits that the refracted spectrum is reflected in sensory neurons in the brain in the same linear pattern as the rainbow; meaning what is outside us is reflected in our neurology, highlighting just how much our kinship with nature is expressed through color.

Murdock makes paintings plein air, often at dusk, engaging with a setting sun or moonlight over a shoreline. She paints with urgency in colors that range from naturalistic to exceedingly vibrant, and allows her marks to respond to the light of the passing day. A grove of trees or a coastline may cohere then dissolve again next to open, pointillist fields of paint or impasto strokes interrupted by scrubby passages. This fluency is often punctuated by globs of paint, arranged in a rainbow-like palette and foregrounded directly onto the surface. With this move Murdock lays bare the mechanics of making her paintings, refuses illusory qualities and rather, insists on the fleeting experience of being in nature and attending to all its sensory wonder. 

Murdock finds these corners of Eden in New York City places like City Island, Bronx, or McGolrick Park, Brooklyn, or elsewhere along the east coast especially in Maine – several works on view were painted here in Boothbay Harbor. She forages for wood to use as painting surfaces, which she later cuts into circular panels, embracing rawness and wood grain as a compositional element. In Murdock’s tondos, she omits any sign of human intervention – no architecture or characters – and instead, she implicates us around the painting’s perimeter, attaching plastic items she gathers in these locations. She sorts bottle caps, old lids, or rope to find resonance between the hard industrial color of the detritus and the particular palette of each painting. The plastic caps then become like frames or containers, held together with wire, like a pop-infused ready-made, darkly humorous and attention-grabbing in the way they remind us of society’s destructive dominion over nature. The palette of this commercial refuse – bright primaries, oranges, blacks, often stamped with logos or ‘best by’ dates – connects to the emotions of her painted scenes, amplifying the joy in electric renderings of foliage or the moodiness of dripping, striated marks that signal a faraway horizon. 

Ferlito’s nocturnes operate in concert with her mothing endeavors. Mothing is a night practice using a screen and UV light to attract different moth species within an environment. Ferlito photographs her findings, the moths’ natural arrangement and density, which she produces as  cyanotypes on fabric. The cyanotypes capture patterns and silhouette of each creature and serve as raw material to inform her standalone paintings. In Haploa Flower Variation, Ferlito paints a grouping of six huddled moths, positioned nose to nose across separate, shaped panels comparing variation of pattern within the species. Painting on muslin, Ferlito allows the color to seep in and create a soft, naturalistic effect that’s conducive to detailing the moth’s markings. There’s an economy to her work, deftly borrowing from Color Field painting to put the specimen squarely beside the art historical canon in a joyful way. 

In a work titled Yellow Night, Ferlito presents a gridded, exposed stretcher bar, its pine lengths are painted a gradient from yellow to red to violet. Evoking a window, one frame of the stretcher contains a cyanotype of moths while in another hangs a paper vest. The vest, gray and delicate like an insect’s wings, suggests an aspect of decoration or cloaking while its support shifts to shimmering white gold leaf. These moments of exposure and decoration, of examining and offering, feel like hypotheticals in a field excursion: perhaps the vest is for us to try on, our own metamorphosis available through costume. Ferlito notes that, in an age of catastrophic global decline for insects, moths can tell us a lot about a place – what is and isn’t there. Even in the dark of night, they urge us to see, notice and share the world around us.