From Our Archives: Sally Gall

'Efflorescence' 2013 © Sally Gall

This interview was initially featured in our 17th Issue: Enigma

STEVE MILLER: I saw your show Aerial and it blew me away. No one would guess that it’s laundry. Without any context for the series, a number of people guess sea creatures first. Was that an intentional enigma?

SALLY GALL: When I started making this body of work, I thought of the clothing as being otherworldly and animalistic, and very much like creatures in the ocean (the ocean being the blue canvas of sky). When I showed some of this new work to people they responded with “what am I looking at?” which was very surprising to me. While I was shooting I kept thinking of abstract painters such as Joan Miro and his “creatures”. I was aware that I was transforming the clothing I was photographing into something other than itself and it was the act of transformation that was compelling, not necessarily the references.

'Squall' 2014 © Sally Gall

STEVE: I think part of the enigma is the lack of scale and uncertainty.

SALLY: When I started the series, I was making photographs that were much more literal than abstract as I included architecture, pieces of buildings and balconies . . and clothespins . . but as I kept photographing I started eliminating context. I wanted to make the photos more disembodied. It made photographing difficult because I had to find subject matter that fit my criteria perfectly - clothing not hanging too close to a building for example. (I was mainly photographing in alleyways and narrow streets of the historic centers of small towns in southern Italy and Sicily). I photograph what I see and I compose in the field, so these are all real found situations.

'Composition #1' 2014 © Sally Gall

STEVE: That’s interesting. It answers a lot of questions about the lack of scale and specificity. You don’t know􏰃where you are and I think that’s part of the enigmatic, mysterious, and successful quality of the work.

SALLY: The body of work morphed from realism into total abstraction. It started as a literal description of the laundry itself with an interest in exploring the humanity on view, the bits of buildings, and the sense of “who wore those jeans”? “Did the guy live in that building”? “Whose nightgown is that”? “Who is the party girl” etc. But then I started moving into abstraction and began referencing, as you said sea creatures, flowers, botanicals. One viewer said about one of the photos that has a number of different woolen objects􏰂(scarves, hats) hanging on a line. “It looks like the animals in the zoo are fighting with each other.”

'Red Poppy' 2014 © Sally Gall

STEVE: Most of your work is black and white, so to see this color was like looking at a different artist.

SALLY: I shot in black and white at the beginning, and I realized it wasn’t working. I love black and white photography more than anything, but this body of work is about brilliant color; eye candy. The work is all about bright sun, luminosity, and saturated color.

'Oceana' 2014 © Sally Gall

STEVE: The way you use black and white in your earlier work is as an intentional tool to bring it towards abstraction, to take it away from the reality factor. And now you’ve achieved the same effect in color.

SALLY: Thanks for saying that, I don’t know if I ever thought about it like that but yes, you’re right. When I shot in black and white, they looked too realistic even, which is ironic as black and white is inherently abstract.

'Tailwind' 2014 © Sally Gall

STEVE: The color pushes it towards the abstraction you were trying to achieve with black and white! When I saw the show, I immediately thought of your book, The Water’s Edge, because this work easily slides between edges. The edges of painterly abstraction, a score of musical notes, the viewer’s emotional projection onto a Rorschach blot because we all name it the thing that we think it is based on our experience, the representation of the deep sea and the space of billowing clouds. In your mind, are any of these descriptions more accurate than another?

SALLY: You’re my perfect viewer! I was thinking particularly of the sea. I’m looking up rather than down, and I thought of the vast expansive of blue as a sky or as the sea. I thought of the imagery as sea life in the deep blue or celestial objects in the heavens.

For more of this interview, check out our 17th Issue: Enigma