Project Description
Lyndi Sales, Uncharted realm, 2022, acrylic and ink on archival paper, 53.5 x 46.5 inches (framed)
EXHIBITION DATES
September 8 to October 29, 2022
NANCY TOOMEY FINE ART
1275 Minnesota Street, San Francisco
Nancy Toomey Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by Lyndi Sales titled (Un)Known Realms, on view from September 8 to October 29, 2022. The gallery is located inside San Francisco’s Minnesota Street Project, 1275 Minnesota Street. Gallery hours are Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, 12pm to 4pm, and by appointment–please contact nancy@nancytoomeyfineart.com or 415-307-9038.
The public is invited to meet artist Lyndi Sales, in town from South Africa, at the gallery on Saturday, September 10, from 4pm to 6pm.
Lyndi Sales, Unmapped realm, 2022, acrylic and ink on archival paper, 53.5 x 46.5 inches (framed)
Lyndi Sales created the works in her (Un)Known Realms exhibition with a process that involved the accumulation of thousands of pieces of paper–each with its own unique color combination, gradation, fragmented brush texture, and shape–reconfigured into an abstract composition. Sales works intuitively from the center outwards and her palette is guided by contrasting color combinations and spiraling compositions that come to her through experiences with plant medicine and connections to mythological archetypes.
Lyndi Sales, Feathery guides, 2022, acrylic and ink on archival paper, 53.5 x 46.5 inches (framed)
Lyndi Sales’s work exists at the interface of art and rationalism, reason and wonder. Working with hand-woven textiles, sculptural installation, intricately cut perspex, and paper and collage works, Sales’s pieces are located in a scientific register where she often interrogates the properties of light or the crystalline structure of chemicals. Her surprising combination of art and science take on new and curious configurations that often illuminate the fragile nature of our existence and temporality. In this exhibition, through the process of deconstruction, in the form of cutting up sheets of hand painted paper and found paper maps, she reassembles the fragments into abstract musings to create depictions of new territories or portals to unfamiliar and undiscovered places.
Lyndi Sales, Crystalline blue border crossing, 2022, acrylic and ink on archival paper, 46.5 x 53.5 inches (framed)
Sales often looks to the history of cartography as a starting point and in this series she has cut into found paper map ephemera as a way to suggest new ways of seeing the unseen. Diagrammatic representations of land and sea are evocative of journey, they help us visualize the unobservable, and through mapping we are able to realize our place within our individual worlds and on our planet. Sometimes resembling a plant specimen captured between two sheets of glass, or an exploding star in a faraway galaxy, these works could be gateways to how we see ourselves in nature, or even as nature, in the macro and microcosm.
Lyndi Sales, Aerial perspective, 2022, acrylic and ink on archival paper, 53.5 x 46.5 inches (framed)
“Unknown realms in ancient documents are synonymous with danger and the forbidden areas only traversed by the courageous,” says Sales. “My desire is to see with closed eyes, or rather through the veil of the everyday in the hope that other realms do exist beyond what we think we know to be true.”
Lyndi Sales, photo by David Bloomer
Born in 1973, Lyndi Sales is based in Cape Town, South Africa, the country she represented at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011. Sales has taught as a visiting lecturer at Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town and University of Stellenbosch. She has held solo shows internationally at Galerie Maria Lund in Paris, M Contemporary in Sydney, and Goodman Gallery and Whatiftheworld Gallery in Cape Town. She has participated in numerous group shows in South Africa, the United States, and throughout Europe. Her work can be found in various major public and private collections worldwide, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C, Texas A&M University, Library of Congress, New York Public Library, the Arthur and Mata Jaffe Collection at Florida Atlantic University, McGill University, Facebook Offices, FRAC de la Haute Normandie, Société Générale Art Foundation, France Sasol Sandton, Redbul Hangar-7 in Salzburg, and University of Cape Town.
(Un)Known Realms is Lyndi Sales’s fourth show with Nancy Toomey in San Francisco.
Lyndi Sales, photo by David Bloomer
